UC Merced

It is often argued that the egocentric perspective is the default perspective

in natural language use. However, there are many factors that influence which

perspective a person takes. In this dissertation I look at various environmental,

biological, social, and linguistic cues that point toward another hypothesis for

consideration than just the default perspective of egocentricism. It is probable

that there is a bias toward the egocentric perspective given we are constrained to

a body which provides us with many more experiences of an egocentric

perspective but we are able to take other perspectives with relative ease and

frequency. These occurrences of an other-centric perspective suggest a graded

spatial attraction toward competing perspectives that result in a continuous,

rather than a stage-based, account of perspective taking and encourage a more

all-inclusive theoretical framework for taking a perspective.