A Linguistics Question

[Toni]

A very good friend since adolescence and I sometimes ‘talk’ to each other in our heads and imagine what the other person might say if we posed a certain question.

I do much the same, as I think many do. But, as far as your brain is concerned, that is a social exchange, and uses the same neural anatomy as any other social exchange. You're positing the other person rather than experiencing them, but the motivation and framing of the ensuing conversation is nevertheless social in nature. A fever is still an immunological response, even if a particular fever was triggered by a psychosomatic rather than viral challenge.

Right but: I’m stranded on a desert island. No communication with any living thing, by any means. I am living off of tinned food. If I talk to myself, is it still speech?

 

[Politesse]

A very good friend since adolescence and I sometimes ‘talk’ to each other in our heads and imagine what the other person might say if we posed a certain question.

I do much the same, as I think many do. But, as far as your brain is concerned, that is a social exchange, and uses the same neural anatomy as any other social exchange. You're positing the other person rather than experiencing them, but the motivation and framing of the ensuing conversation is nevertheless social in nature. A fever is still an immunological response, even if a particular fever was triggered by a psychosomatic rather than viral challenge.

Right but: I’m stranded on a desert island. No communication with any living thing, by any means. I am living off of tinned food. If I talk to myself, is it still speech?

It is, sure. You will very likely be personalizing the exchange, using your social apparatus, positing a personality or motivation on the part of your invisible interlocutor, etc. Had you no social instinct or drive, you would not require speech in order to mediate your thought process. We do, though, and even our private thoughts are heavily influenced by socially acquired categorizations, framed in language and not uncommonly experienced as simulacra of dialectic exchange.

 

[Copernicus]

I'm still trying to understand what kind of answer Rousseau was looking for when he created the thread title "A Linguistic Question". It seems that we can wander all over the place looking for that answer, so I'm not sure that any particular search in Google Scholar is going to turn up anything useful. If one is looking for a categorization of topics that people talk about in everyday conversation, that seems tantamount to coming up with an analysis of topics that people think about every day and feel a need to bring up in communication.

As such, topic distribution isn't of much central concern linguistic studies, since linguistics is focused more on how one communicates in language rather than what one communicates about. There are areas of linguistics that might be of marginal relevance to the question. So a linguist, for example, would be more interested in what triggers bilingual speakers to shift from one language to another during the course of a conversation. Code switching of that sort is affected by what sociolinguists call "register"--a variety of language used for some purpose in a social situation. This is not my special area of expertise in linguistics, but there might be some studies that focus on the frequency of code switching and the topics that trigger it.

 

[lpetrich]

The origin of human language is a big problem, since it is far in advance over what our closest relatives have, and because it does not produce easily fossilized evidence. We have an adaptation for producing language sounds, the top of our windpipe being well below the back of the mouth, In our closest relatives, it extends up into the back of the mouth, and in human babies, it sticks up that high, then descends. We pay a price for increasing the variety of sounds that we can make: we are vulnerable to choking.

Teaching human language members of other species has had the most success in chimpanzees, our closest relatives, but that success has been *very* limited. Chimps can't make many of the speech sounds that we can make, and the most success has been had with sign language. Chimps can learn lots of individual signs, but their ability to string those signs together is *very* limited - mostly two-sign phrases, like "drink fruit" for watermelon.

I've found an interesting theory:

• Music in Human Evolution | Melting Asphalt
• Did Music Evolve Before Language? | Science 2.0
• How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect -- ScienceDaily
• Monkey lip smacks provide new insights into the evolution of human speech -- ScienceDaily
• How human language could have evolved from birdsong: Researchers propose new theory on deep roots of human speech -- ScienceDaily

That human speech emerged from singing, and that singing was originally much like birdsong, without much semantic content.

That gets around the problem of how several things can evolve together -- only a few at a time need to evolve. Birdsong requires vocal control and sequencing to generate, and it is often learned. So it's been studied in the hope of providing clues about the origin of human language.

But singing birds are *very* far from humanity in evolutionary terms, and convergent evolution often has lots of differences in detail.

Scientists Sequence Genomes of 48 Bird Species, Unveil Avian Family Tree | Genetics | Sci-News.com
and
Ornithologists Publish Most Comprehensive Avian Tree of Life | Sci-News.com

The singing birds are a subgroup of Passeriformes, the taxonomic order of sparrow-like birds. These birds' closest relatives are the Psittacoformes, the taxonomic order of parrot species, and parrots are well-known for their ability to make imitations of sound sequences. Some passerines also have a parrot-like ability to imitate sounds, and that's how mockingbirds got their name.

But the most recent human - parrot common ancestor was an early reptile in the Late Carboniferous, a little over 300 million years ago, and neither chimps nor most other birds share their vocal abilities.

 

[lpetrich]

 Vocal learning - in a very limited set of species, and very scattered. So it emerged several times.

Now to singing before speech, the la-la hypothesis. Why might that be plausible? It breaks down the evolution of language into these two steps:

• Vocal sequencing and vocal learning
• Transmission of meaning

The first one emerged in scattered fashion, once in our ancestors of a few million years ago, at least once in the passerine-parrot clade, once in hummingbird ancestors, and likely more than once in cetaceans, in oceanic dolphins (Delphinidae) and in humpback whales. Oceanic dolphins include some of the most-studied cetaceans, the bottlenose dolphin and the orca (killer whale).

But only in our species and possibly also in dolphins do we find evidence of the second step.

 

[Swammerdami]

What does that mean in context of someone talking to themselves? (when alone)

Interesting that you contextualize this as "talking to yourself". Why not "speaking to no one", or "speaking within yourself"?

I talk to cats and computers on occasion as well. Is that also "talking to myself"? If not, how does it differ? Is it an entirely non-social exchange?

I’m thinking of: being alone—not even a pet. Not even talking to an appliance or vehicle. But talking to one’s self.

A very good friend since adolescence and I sometimes ‘talk’ to each other in our heads and imagine what the other person might say if we posed a certain question. Or, when making certain dishes my mother used to make, as her mother did before her, I sometimes have mental conversations with them ( don’t worry: I know they’re both dead). Sometimes people say that when they are considering…what direction in life to take or a certain problem, they hear the voices of a trusted adviser in their heads....

Toni's comment is reminiscent of Jaynes' views on the "Bicameral Mind."

Whether talking to oneself fits into a linguistic category, it may be a mental behavior that did not exist until human speech developed.

I also talk to myself, sometimes even moving my lips! (Lately I sometimes hum songs in public, perhaps because that's less embarrassing than prose.)

Are there any studies about talking to oneself? I do NOT do it when I'm working efficiently or performing tasks at which I am especially competent.

 

[skepticalbip]

I have always heard the term "thinking out loud" much more that "talking to myself"... maybe it's a southern thing. But that expression does make more sense to me because we (at least, I) find that I think and/or reason in either words or images, but primarily in words. To be honest I can't imagine how I could any other way. It is one of the reasons that I found George Orwell's 1984 to be so brilliant. His "newspeak" in the novel limited language and so limited the population's ability to even think of things that were not allowed because there were no longer words for those concepts.

 

[Toni]

I have always heard the term "thinking out loud" much more that "talking to myself"... maybe it's a southern thing. But that expression does make more sense to me because we (at least, I) find that I think and/or reason in either words or images, but primarily in words. To be honest I can't imagine how I could any other way. It is one of the reasons that I found George Orwell's 1984 to be so brilliant. His "newspeak" in the novel limited language and so limited the population's ability to even think of things that were not allowed because there were no longer words for those concepts.

Not a southerner, but up north in my neck of the words, we might say: "thinking aloud here' to voice ideas that are not yet fully formulated, but in response to an ongoing conversation, for example, something centered on solving a problem. A little less crude than 'spitballing' and implies a little more actual thought. "I'm just thinking aloud here, but what if we instituted a standing Friday Night margaritas night at the bar down the street?' Or "Just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't there be better flow if we closed up that doorway and took down the wall to the left?"

 

[skepticalbip]

I have always heard the term "thinking out loud" much more that "talking to myself"... maybe it's a southern thing. But that expression does make more sense to me because we (at least, I) find that I think and/or reason in either words or images, but primarily in words. To be honest I can't imagine how I could any other way. It is one of the reasons that I found George Orwell's 1984 to be so brilliant. His "newspeak" in the novel limited language and so limited the population's ability to even think of things that were not allowed because there were no longer words for those concepts.

Not a southerner, but up north in my neck of the words, we might say: "thinking aloud here' to voice ideas that are not yet fully formulated, but in response to an ongoing conversation, for example, something centered on solving a problem. A little less crude than 'spitballing' and implies a little more actual thought. "I'm just thinking aloud here, but what if we instituted a standing Friday Night margaritas night at the bar down the street?' Or "Just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't there be better flow if we closed up that doorway and took down the wall to the left?"

You missed the meaning of the post. Yes, the expression is used as you describe but I meant that it is used here also as actually 'thinking out loud'. As an example; if someone is is deep in thought at a workbench trying to understand why some gizmo isn't working as it should so they can repair it, they may be mumbling to themselves each mechanical step the gizmo has to make and what could prevent that step in order to trace where the problem may be. If someone asks what the guy is talking about, they will be told that he is just "thinking out loud".

It would be an expansion on someone mumbling "what the fuck" if their computer freezes up and they loose an hour's work. They are thinking "what the fuck" in frustration and it comes out verbally... 'thinking out loud'.

 

[Toni]

I have always heard the term "thinking out loud" much more that "talking to myself"... maybe it's a southern thing. But that expression does make more sense to me because we (at least, I) find that I think and/or reason in either words or images, but primarily in words. To be honest I can't imagine how I could any other way. It is one of the reasons that I found George Orwell's 1984 to be so brilliant. His "newspeak" in the novel limited language and so limited the population's ability to even think of things that were not allowed because there were no longer words for those concepts.

Not a southerner, but up north in my neck of the words, we might say: "thinking aloud here' to voice ideas that are not yet fully formulated, but in response to an ongoing conversation, for example, something centered on solving a problem. A little less crude than 'spitballing' and implies a little more actual thought. "I'm just thinking aloud here, but what if we instituted a standing Friday Night margaritas night at the bar down the street?' Or "Just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't there be better flow if we closed up that doorway and took down the wall to the left?"

You missed the meaning of the post. Yes, the expression is used as you describe but I meant that it is used here also as actually 'thinking out loud'. As an example; if someone is is deep in thought at a workbench trying to understand why some gizmo isn't working as it should so they can repair it, they may be mumbling to themselves each mechanical step the gizmo has to make and what could prevent that step in order to trace where the problem may be. If someone asks what the guy is talking about, they will be told that he is just "thinking out loud".

It would be an expansion on someone mumbling "what the fuck" if their computer freezes up and they loose an hour's work. They are thinking "what the fuck" in frustration and it comes out verbally... 'thinking out loud'.

We do that up north too.

 

[skepticalbip]

I have always heard the term "thinking out loud" much more that "talking to myself"... maybe it's a southern thing. But that expression does make more sense to me because we (at least, I) find that I think and/or reason in either words or images, but primarily in words. To be honest I can't imagine how I could any other way. It is one of the reasons that I found George Orwell's 1984 to be so brilliant. His "newspeak" in the novel limited language and so limited the population's ability to even think of things that were not allowed because there were no longer words for those concepts.

Not a southerner, but up north in my neck of the words, we might say: "thinking aloud here' to voice ideas that are not yet fully formulated, but in response to an ongoing conversation, for example, something centered on solving a problem. A little less crude than 'spitballing' and implies a little more actual thought. "I'm just thinking aloud here, but what if we instituted a standing Friday Night margaritas night at the bar down the street?' Or "Just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't there be better flow if we closed up that doorway and took down the wall to the left?"

You missed the meaning of the post. Yes, the expression is used as you describe but I meant that it is used here also as actually 'thinking out loud'. As an example; if someone is is deep in thought at a workbench trying to understand why some gizmo isn't working as it should so they can repair it, they may be mumbling to themselves each mechanical step the gizmo has to make and what could prevent that step in order to trace where the problem may be. If someone asks what the guy is talking about, they will be told that he is just "thinking out loud".

It would be an expansion on someone mumbling "what the fuck" if their computer freezes up and they loose an hour's work. They are thinking "what the fuck" in frustration and it comes out verbally... 'thinking out loud'.

We do that up north too.

Of course you do. You are human and it is a human thing. I wouldn't have used the examples if I didn't think you would be familiar with them. I was just saying that the expression, "thinking out loud" seems much more accurate a description of it than "talking to oneself" when someone does it. Thinking is a personal activity while talking connotes communication with another.

 

[rousseau]

I'm still trying to understand what kind of answer Rousseau was looking for when he created the thread title "A Linguistic Question". It seems that we can wander all over the place looking for that answer, so I'm not sure that any particular search in Google Scholar is going to turn up anything useful. If one is looking for a categorization of topics that people talk about in everyday conversation, that seems tantamount to coming up with an analysis of topics that people think about every day and feel a need to bring up in communication.

As such, topic distribution isn't of much central concern linguistic studies, since linguistics is focused more on how one communicates in language rather than what one communicates about. There are areas of linguistics that might be of marginal relevance to the question. So a linguist, for example, would be more interested in what triggers bilingual speakers to shift from one language to another during the course of a conversation. Code switching of that sort is affected by what sociolinguists call "register"--a variety of language used for some purpose in a social situation. This is not my special area of expertise in linguistics, but there might be some studies that focus on the frequency of code switching and the topics that trigger it.

I realize now that I likely jumped the gun on the thread title. Linguistics is one of the fields I've read about the least (essentially not at all), but every now and then I conjure up a question that I think may be related. I once tried to pose a question at the linguistics stack exchange, but they don't suffer amateurs like me lightly.

Thanks for the keywords you posted earlier, that'll give me something to kill an evening with anyway.

 

[Copernicus]

One thing that I have noticed about the content of conversations that intrigues me is the amount of time people spend in negotiating word and expression usage so that they can achieve a better understanding or direct the direction of discourse. This kind of thing is especially pronounced in discussion boards like this one, where the debates often descend into disputes over terminology. I'm not sure that there is much research into this type of metalinguistic communicative strategy.

 

[Politesse]

I'm still trying to understand what kind of answer Rousseau was looking for when he created the thread title "A Linguistic Question". It seems that we can wander all over the place looking for that answer, so I'm not sure that any particular search in Google Scholar is going to turn up anything useful. If one is looking for a categorization of topics that people talk about in everyday conversation, that seems tantamount to coming up with an analysis of topics that people think about every day and feel a need to bring up in communication.

As such, topic distribution isn't of much central concern linguistic studies, since linguistics is focused more on how one communicates in language rather than what one communicates about. There are areas of linguistics that might be of marginal relevance to the question. So a linguist, for example, would be more interested in what triggers bilingual speakers to shift from one language to another during the course of a conversation. Code switching of that sort is affected by what sociolinguists call "register"--a variety of language used for some purpose in a social situation. This is not my special area of expertise in linguistics, but there might be some studies that focus on the frequency of code switching and the topics that trigger it.

I realize now that I likely jumped the gun on the thread title. Linguistics is one of the fields I've read about the least (essentially not at all), but every now and then I conjure up a question that I think may be related. I once tried to pose a question at the linguistics stack exchange, but they don't suffer amateurs like me lightly.

Thanks for the keywords you posted earlier, that'll give me something to kill an evening with anyway.

I would not consider your question outside the range of sociolinguistics at all. This blended field is much less allergic to questions of use and meaning than the Chomskyan creation.

 

[Elixir]

Since formal education and written languages are recent developments, ordinary conversation may be the oldest usage of language. I wonder how the question of topics of modern conversation relates to the origin and earliest developments of human language. WHY was human language developed in the first place? It wasn't needed to pass on paleolithic skills like fire-making and tool-making: these are learned by imitation rather than spoken instruction.

Perhaps the language of chimpanzees — though mostly signed rather than spoken — would shed some light. IIUC the topic of much chimpanzee "conversation" is grooming or flirtation!

I suspect tribal survival advantage, as increasingly sophisticated grunts enabled more complex cooperative behaviors.

 

[bilby]

There is such a subfield as sociolinguistics. Psychology is relevant. There is no speech without social intent.

What does that mean in context of someone talking to themselves? (when alone)

Interesting that you contextualize this as "talking to yourself". Why not "speaking to no one", or "speaking within yourself"?

I talk to cats and computers on occasion as well. Is that also "talking to myself"? If not, how does it differ? Is it an entirely non-social exchange?

As the late , great Ronnie Barker said:

There I go again, talking to myself.

One day someone will overhear me, and them where will I be?

Well, I'll be talking to someone else, won't I?

 

[Copernicus]

I would not consider your question outside the range of sociolinguistics at all. This blended field is much less allergic to questions of use and meaning than the Chomskyan creation.

That's because Chomsky views a linguistic system as a psychological system. It can also be viewed as a social system, but the description of a linguistic system then takes on very different properties. Linguists have always struggled with this problem of which way to construe a linguistic system, but I consider both perspectives entirely correct and justified. It's just important to keep straight which type of system one is trying to describe. Language functions systemically on both levels--the individual and the social--since it is fundamentally a means of social interaction that allows people to share their private thoughts.

 

[Swammerdami]

Conversation takes place in turns.

If I have a 1-minute conversation with someone I might speak for 30 seconds, and they might spend 30 seconds on a response. Two turns. Or the same 60 seconds might be filled with twenty turns if we alternate short utterances of three-second duration each.

I'd think the statistics of turn duration would be an important part of linguistics! Does typical turn duration vary between languages?

Consider the following excerpt from The Second World War: Volume 4, The Hinge of Fate. I had trouble understanding it until I learned about "turns."

The rigidity of the Japanese planning and the tendency to abandon the object when their plans did not go according to schedule is thought to have been largely due to the cumbersome and imprecise nature of their language, which rendered it extremely difficult to improvise by means of signalled communications

Is this really valid? Or was Churchill getting silly advice?!

Or, is it possible that Japanese is "imprecise" because precision is sacrificed for brevity? In normal conversation an imprecise but brief utterance may be better than a long precise utterance: The listener can ask for clarification as needed. But conversing in turns is more difficult in naval communication, especially when radio silence is a goal. Could this be the source of Churchill's observation?

 

[Politesse]

Turn taking has been an important part of socolinguistics from the start. A 1974 issue of Linguistics focused on turn taking, and launched a considerable wave of interest in the question over the ensuing decades of conversation analysis studies. You are correct to guess that it varies, but less between language than between cultures, which set up surprisingly specific rules of "polite speech" when you really dig in to their logic.

Churchill is talking silly bobbles there, though; information transfer happens at roughly the same rate in all languages. Beware language stereotypes, they are not trustworthy guides.

 

[Copernicus]

Poli is right. Every language adapts to the desires and needs of its community of speakers. There is nothing about the Japanese language that made its speakers prone to behave much differently from English speakers. Its culture just emerged out of a different set of historical circumstances. And I'm not sure that they were any better at dealing with plans gone awry than the British or Americans were, but it suited Churchill to think so.