Deictic Navigation Network: Linguistic Viewpoint Disturbances in Schizophrenia

This paper introduces the Deictic Navigation Network, a cognitive-linguistic framework to analyze and clarify the nature of viewpoint disturbances in language, applied to schizophrenia. We argue that such disturbances have linguistic counterparts in the use of deixis: linguistic elements of which the interpretation relies on the situational context of the discourse and their connection to a subject-bound perspective. The DNN connects such linguistic phenomena to three viewpoint disturbances, which can manifest in different degrees of extremity: (i) the reduced capacity to recognize one’s own subjective perspective and the subjective perspectives of others; (ii) the reduced capacity to separate present perspectives from distinct past, future, and hypothetical perspectives; and (iii) the reduced capacity to integrate projected viewpoint structures into the actual here-and-now. We explain how application of the DNN to language in schizophrenia enables the localization of perspectivization disturbances and helps to clarify the nature of disturbances in the ability to build complex viewpoint structures in language as well as cognition.