Vittorio Tantucci: Language and Social Minds: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Intersubjectivity

This book represents a ground-breaking and commendable contribution, for it combines insights from different disciplinary fields and, most importantly, brings together research on Theory of Mind (ToM) and intersubjectivity, which have been the focus of two separate lines of research—cognitive psychology and usage-based linguistics, respectively. Through the analysis of naturally occurring linguistic expressions of intersubjectivity in spontaneous contexts (Tantucci 2021: 4–5), this volume provides a novel way to detect instances of ToM—i.e. the capacity to think about our own and others’ states of mind (Baron-Cohen 2001: 174). The topic of intersubjectivity is investigated through a large-scale corpus-based methodology and emphasis is given to its cross-cultural dimension, both from the diachronic and from the ontogenetic angles. The book is organized in three parts: in the first part, Chapter 1 introduces the intersubjective gradience model proposed and describes how it links to existing theories in cognitive psychology and linguistics, as well as the gaps it is meant to fill; Chapter 2 describes the two major types of intersubjectivity that are at stake in the gradience model and which inform all of the following discussion throughout the volume: immediate and extended intersubjectivity. The second part of the book is devoted to a number of case studies to illustrate how the model can be applied both to the study of diachronic semasiological reanalysis (Chapter 3) and to the ontogenesis of first language acquisition (Chapter 4). In the last part, Chapter 5 discusses intersubjectivity as a schematic representation of a social persona, and finally sketches the possible applications of the model in different fields, including research on the autism spectrum disorder.