Posted: Jan 14, 2016 11:58 pm
The whole area of self-talk and internalized language is very interesting and has wide ranging implications for the study of language and psychology.
Here is what Langaker, the founder of the field of cognitive grammar has to say on the issue:
"It is generally accepted that the conversational use of language is primary. It is not the most frequent: The award for sheer prevalence goes to the silent verbal thought we engage in at almost every moment of our waking lives[…]
In no small measure, or verbal thought takes the form of an imagined dialogue, if only with ourselves." (2008, p. 459)
The great Russian philosopher Bakhtin concieved of thought as basically dialogic in nature, not monologic.
This from the Wiki on Bakhtin:
The term 'dialogic' does not only apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language — indeed, all thought — appears as dialogical. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. In other words, we do not speak in a vacuum. All language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.
And another Russian the philosopher/ psychologist, Lev Vygotsky also conceived of thought and language as dialogic, that is, the mind is in dialogue with itself and with the external world. From the amazon blurb for his book 'Mind in society':
The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky’s relevance to modem psychological thought.
One of the big problems (in my view) with a lot of traditional linguistics is conceiving of language as monologic. (E.g. Chomsky and the generative tradition works to analyze idealized and de-contextualized sentences, not concerning themselves with actual instances of real language.)
So, if you grant that the internal use of language, that is the private 'inner speech' that you engage in constantly is a kind of dialogue, even with the self, then it presupposes a sender of the message ( analogue to the speaker in external instances of uttered language) and a receiver of the message (analogue to the listener in external uttered language) , even though the sender and the receiver are both the self, there is a duality here that I think accounts for a logical use of 'we' to refer to the self.
Here is what Langaker, the founder of the field of cognitive grammar has to say on the issue:
"It is generally accepted that the conversational use of language is primary. It is not the most frequent: The award for sheer prevalence goes to the silent verbal thought we engage in at almost every moment of our waking lives[…]
In no small measure, or verbal thought takes the form of an imagined dialogue, if only with ourselves." (2008, p. 459)
The great Russian philosopher Bakhtin concieved of thought as basically dialogic in nature, not monologic.
This from the Wiki on Bakhtin:
The term 'dialogic' does not only apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language — indeed, all thought — appears as dialogical. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. In other words, we do not speak in a vacuum. All language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.
And another Russian the philosopher/ psychologist, Lev Vygotsky also conceived of thought and language as dialogic, that is, the mind is in dialogue with itself and with the external world. From the amazon blurb for his book 'Mind in society':
The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky’s relevance to modem psychological thought.
One of the big problems (in my view) with a lot of traditional linguistics is conceiving of language as monologic. (E.g. Chomsky and the generative tradition works to analyze idealized and de-contextualized sentences, not concerning themselves with actual instances of real language.)
So, if you grant that the internal use of language, that is the private 'inner speech' that you engage in constantly is a kind of dialogue, even with the self, then it presupposes a sender of the message ( analogue to the speaker in external instances of uttered language) and a receiver of the message (analogue to the listener in external uttered language) , even though the sender and the receiver are both the self, there is a duality here that I think accounts for a logical use of 'we' to refer to the self.