Abstract

A large part of the empirical literature on language and schizophrenia, as well as the literature on the phenomenology of schizophrenia, can be related to the concept of perspective or viewpoint. In this paper, we aim to bring both bodies of work together in a demonstration of a cognitive linguistic viewpoint analysis, providing the empirical work with theoretical means to interpret part of the findings, and the phenomenological work with an additional empirical ground. In particular, we employ a Deictic Navigation Network to analyze in detail the linguistic manifestations of viewpoint constructions in an authentic conversational narrative of a person diagnosed with schizophrenia. These constructions are found to emerge from the use of tense shifts, spatial deixis, and speech and thought reports. This kind of viewpoint analysis elucidates the complexity of navigating subjective viewpoint structures in conversational narrative, both in linguistic and cognitive respect, and helps to identify potential problems in this navigation process. The final part of the paper discusses how these findings might add to our understanding of perspectivization issues in people with a schizophrenia diagnosis.