An internal monologue is a monologue when a speaker produces his or her own internal thought out of one’s mouth with or without the presence of others. For the latter case, the line between discourse and internal monologue,... [ view full abstract ]
An internal monologue is a monologue when a speaker produces his or her own internal thought out of one’s mouth with or without the presence of others. For the latter case, the line between discourse and internal monologue, in the presence of others, is defined as “quasi-internal monologue (Noda 2006).” When the recipient response, her response becomes a focal point of what she says; however, why does the recipient responds to the quasi-internal monologue in the first place if it were just a monologue. Therefore, this study aims to enter some discussion of what a quasi-internal monologue sounds to the recipient through sociocultural epistemic perspectives. This study aims to elucidate differences in quasi-internal monologue in Japanese and English discourse: when quasi-internal monologues are uttered and what are the recipients’ responses.
Data is used in this study is corpus data that participants, either teacher-student pairs or student-student pairs for both Japanese and American English native speakers, are asked to arrange 15 picture cards to make the most coherent story, or a problem-solving task.
Quasi-internal monologues are observed and categorized based on two forms: interrogative question forms and internal arguments. For interrogative questions, both Japanese and American English speakers utter quasi-internal monologues as if they were speaking to themselves, but there is a major difference between the two languages with regard to the recipients’ reply. Japanese recipients respond to quasi-internal monologues in a monologic way, whereas American English recipients reply to quasi-internal monologues as if they were hearing the utterance like adjacency pairs. In the latter category, internal argument means that the speaker uttering a quasi-internal monologue is trying to negotiate within herself. For speakers in both languages, quasi-internal monologue as internal argument receives a recipient’s response but for Japanese speakers, the recipients either reply in a monologic way or pretend heard nothing. For American English, the quasi-internal monologue, again, receives a substantial response from the recipient. This paper attempts to conclude that why recipients behave differently from each other depending on the languages.
