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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> 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. >> > > _______________________________________________ > xmca mailing list > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca > _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca