Abstract In this article, we argue that not only personal pronouns, but also formats that defocus participants, such as the impersonal pronoun man/ein- , passive and infinitive constructions, are resources for the interpersonal perspectivization of situations. In a case study of 17th-century balneological texts, a historical genre of medical treatise and instruction, we use quantitative and qualitative analyses to show how different resources are used throughout the text to achieve different perspectivization effects (including the typification of discourse roles, the focusing on action steps, and the establishment of deontic authority). The concept of perspectivization proves to be a suitable overarching concept for different communicative practices of viewing events and involving participants in observation arrangements.
Dammel et al. (Tue,) studied this question.