About

This international workshop seeks to bring together specialists working on viewpoint across different disciplines, languages and expressive or semiotic modalities, adopting a format which promotes interaction and discussion so as to learn from the various approaches represented, and to generate new ideas for viewpoint research.

Viewpoint or perspective research in the humanities has a long standing, for instance in the study of narrative, where questions of narration, focalization and reported speech have been prime foci of interest. In the language sciences, in addition to more traditional viewpoint markers such as pronouns, tense and aspect forms, or dedicated hearsay clitics, a broader array of forms is increasingly being revealed to have viewpoint functions, and the viewpoint aspects of figurative language use are starting to be better understood. Beyond language, research on other semiotic modes (as in the image-text combinations in advertising or in many forms of online communication) and expressive modalities (as in gesture and gaze) is providing complementary insights into the workings of viewpoint as a fundamental category of cognition.

Underlying many of the current engagements with viewpoint research is the expectation that results from different modalities may prove to be mutually reinforcing, and lead to better theoretical grasp of the concept of viewpoint. Current research also pervasively recognizes that not all aspects of 'viewpoint' can be visually imagined: a conceptualizer's viewpoint on some aspect of a described situation may concern their position in regard of perception and spatiotemporal location, but also in regard of, e.g., likelihood and knowledge, attitude and feeling, or solidarity/power dynamics. The relation between viewpoint and various types of stance (epistemic, evaluative, affective) thus naturally comes into focus.

The Reviewing viewpoint workshop is a follow-up to similar earlier 'brainstorming' workshops held in Leiden in November 2016 (hosted by Arie Verhagen and Max van Duijn, with further lead presentations by Barbara Dancygier and Lieven Vandelanotte) and in Nijmegen in April 2018 (hosted by Kobie van Krieken, with further lead presentations by Linde van Schuppen and Arie Verhagen).