Subjectivity and subjectivisation: an introduction

Abstract

It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject’. And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language … Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I . Benveniste (1971:226) Among linguists and other professional students of language, the word subject and its derivative subjectivity tend to evoke a grammatical association: subject as distinct from direct object, for example. In some contexts, subjectivity contrasts with objectivity in suggesting something ‘soft’, unverifiable, even suspicious. The essays in this book do treat subjectivity, and they are centrally linguistic in their focus, but they do not address subject as a grammatical relation. Nor do they address objective versus subjective modes of inquiry – in linguistics or else where. Rather, broadly speaking, the subjectivity explored here concerns expression of self and the representation of a speaker's (or, more generally, a locutionary agent's) perspective or point of view in discourse – what has been called a speaker's imprint. In turn, subjectivisation (or subjedification ) refers to the structures and strategies that languages evolve in the linguistic realisation of subjectivity or to the relevant processes of linguistic evolution themselves. As used here, then, subjectivity has an array of meanings, neither so old nor so well studied as grammatical subjecthood, but central to emerging views of discourse – to the intersection of language structure and language use in the expression of self.

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