BY: John Taiwo.

I witnessed a young man extend his hand —his left hand— to another young man for a hand shake. “Of all hands?” The thought ran through my mind. You’re probably thinking culture right now, but this article is not about culture. It’s about “perspectives”. Here is the thing: I witnessed all of these gazing into a mirror, and each time I compared what obtains in reality (the extension of the right hand) to that in the mirror (extension of the left hand), the word echoed in my head. PERSPECTIVE! Human perspectives are a broad spectrum of thoughts which sometimes evinces opposition when compared to one another. Language-wise, our perspectives form the basis of how we encode and decode meaning as speakers and hearers respectively.

On the one hand, as a hearer, to wrongly judge the perspective or standpoint from which a message was encoded oftentimes leads to misunderstanding. The same me who takes my mother at her word to do the dishes before she returns from an outing does not take her by her word to scatter the whole room, and perhaps break everything, before she returns even though she says that at other instances. In the latter, although she has left a lot unsaid, my ability as the recipient of the message to decrypt the hidden message stems from judging rightly the standpoint from which the message came —simply as an instruction and not an encouragement, an imperative not a declaration. On the other hand, it is no different game for the speaker. Since discourse involves the negotiation of meaning, having misperceived meaning, a hearer —when they assume the speaker role in discourse— would likely address the discourse from the standpoint of what they perceive, even though they are mistaken.

Inconsistency in vocabulary across dialects is one of the factors that points out the role of perspective as well as the interconnectedness of language and perspective. Dialects, according to the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary is “the form of a language that is spoken in one area with grammar, words and pronunciation that may be different from other forms of the same language.” With the existence of different terms for a single idea, concept, entity, etc in different dialects of a single language, and sometimes the clash of meaning between the different usage of a single vocabulary term present in more than one dialects of a language, the role of perspective in decoding messages becomes important. To illustrate, “pant” is an existing word in both American and British English. Whereas in the former, the term refers to trouser, it refers to “underwear” in the latter. The usage of these term in these dialects, for example, conditions users perspective. In the case of a discourse involving individuals from the speech community in which the word is used differently, until either party understand the possible usage of the term in there dialects, there would be confusion. In fact, the wrong message would be passed across.

From the foregoing, its is arguable that perspective intertwines with context in conversation. The possible contexts in which an utterance could be made offers a continuum of perspectives from which its meaning may be assessed. If I were to say to my friend with whom I’m jesting at a point in time,”get out”,this would in no way mean the same as “get out” fired at a person when I am venting my anger at them. To “suggest” to my boss would indeed pass as a suggestion, meanwhile a suggestion from my boss to carry out a task may not really be a suggestion but a directive. In these examples, the context, that is, situations surrounding the utterances enables an individual to know which meaning to assign to an utterance at a particular time.

Interestingly, contexts manifests in a number of ways ranging from linguistic context to situational context through social context. Linguistics contexts offers insight to the meaning of an utterance through consideration of adjoining speech elements in a discourse while situational, illustrated in earlier examples, helps to know the situation in which an utterance was made. Social context in itself offers insight into the existing relationships between interlocutors, the understanding of which would aid the interpretation of any discourse, that is, conversation, text (either written or spoken), etc.