Andy-- Is private speech another way of controlling ourselves from the
outside?
mike
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Peter, it is very interesting to me to discuss something I know
nothing about. How else can we subject our fundamentals to test?
Firstly, Peter, I think it is incoherent for you to talk of
"conversation" as an "irreducible functional unit." "Conversation"
is the whole animal not the cell. And in any case, it's not actually
a conversation, though you might conceive of it as a limit case of a
conversation if you wanted to. But you could also conceptualise what
is going on as a performance, and a performance requires a script,
scenes and stage directions; it *can* have an audience but doesn't
have to have an audience (addressee).
Also, I don't think being a long monologue is any bar to being an
utterance. Luther's 95 theses was an utterance in my reading, as was
the Gettysburg Address. They can be broken down, but if they are,
they cease to be an utterance and cannot be understood in that way
as "a move".
Question: is private speech always associated with practical
actions? If so, aren't these actions part of your unit of analysis?
Andy
Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
So we must approach the problem from both a practical and a
conceptual
perspective, and find a way to make them coincide. For Bakhtin,
utterance
unit boundaries can be concretely identified by turn-taking. For
Vygotsky,
word meaning is the irreducible unit of analysis, beneath which the
functional integration of word and meaning ceases to exist. If
conversation is, indeed,
that irreducible functional unit, then what is the smallest
concrete form
conversation can take? It cannot be defined as a turn at talk,
for some
turns can be quite extensive, such as a monologue consisting of
multiple
sentences.
But if an individual utterance is defined in terms of a single
word (at
minimum)
or a single sentence (at maximum), and these linguistic
structures are
shown to have the functional properties of conversation (i.e.,
they participate
in an initiation-response structure with other utterance units
or practical
activity),
then this unit would meet both the practical and conceptual
criteria we
have been discussing.
Of course, this does not address all of the problems associated
with the
analysis of private speech utterances, for there is still the knotty
problem of
*who is conversing with whom*! But that moves the problem down a
different
path, which is a whole other topic.
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