The discursive nature of inner speech

Abstract

If inner speech is first of all speech, then a critical departure point is to study its discursive nature. The aim of this paper is to deepen the notion of inner speech from a discursive and dialogical perspective. Drawing on the works of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Vološinov, we discuss the idea that consciousness is structured by language, exploring the concept of internalization, and making an analogy between acts of thinking and uttering. Inner discourse is understood as a dialogical movement of interchange between different ideological positions. Furthermore, we propose a distinction between inner discourse and self-talk: inner discourse is a basal dialogical process that may give form to syntactically well-organized self-talk, but also to processes that are on the border of language because of a weak or very instable syntactic organization. Consequently, inner discourse should be conceived of not as a homogeneous and unitary process but as a heterogeneous class of discursive practices.