Lecture | LUCL Colloquium
How did you get into my head? The linguistics of self-talk and its kin
- Date
- Friday 25 September 2026
- Time
- Serie
- LUCL Colloquium
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.20
Abstract
Humans are known to talk to themselves, a phenomenon we here refer to as self-talk, and which — for the purpose of this talk — I define as talking (in silence or out loud) in the absence of an other individual who is intended as the recipient.
Self-talk is known to assist in the process of having complex thoughts, especially in the context of difficult tasks. But self-talk is also known to convey thoughts to ourselves. This is perhaps somewhat surprising. After all, I should be intimately familiar with the content of my own thoughts. Yet, evidence suggests that humans do indeed use self-talk in this way, as evidenced by the fact that we can motivate ourselves (You can do it), derogate ourselves (You are such an idiot), ask questions of ourselves (What did I want here again?) and issue commands to ourselves (Martina, get your act together).
The linguistic form of these instances of self-talk clearly reveal that the speaker has an addressee in mind: the speaker can refer to herself with the 2nd person pronoun, she can use imperatives, and she can even use a vocative to name herself. All of these linguistic strategies are known to require an addressee. This suggests that in self-talk, humans can treat themselves as if they were addressing an other. So why is it, that we can do so without losing sight that we are a unified self. In other words, what distinguishes the positive version of treating oneself as an other from its pathological counterpart, which defines schizophrenia?
I argue that the answer to this question lies in the nature of human linguisticalty, defined (according to Haspelmath 2020) as the species-specific set of capacities that allows humans to learn and use languages in all their diverse forms, and which is invariant across the entire human population. There is significant evidence that, as part ouf this linguisticality, mental representations of language in interaction include the speaker and the addressee role. All languages have linguistic elements that serve to overtly express these interactional roles (e.g., vocatives and sentence-peripheral particles that convey information about he speaker's or the addressee's epistemic state). In interaction, the speaker role is typically indexed to the self, whereas the addressee role is indexed to an other, namely the individual the speaker is addressing in interaction.
Significantly, these interactional roles so conceived are linguistic (and hence cognitive) constructs: they constitute grammatical categories of sorts. As such they have their roots in — but are not identical to — individual perspectives of real world knowledge. I will present linguistic evidence to the effect that the addressee role can be present at least in some forms of self-talk, namely when we refer to ourselves with you. In this case, the individual engaged in self-talk can either identify with the speaker-role (addressing an externalized version of the self, i.e., a mirror image) or with the addressee-role (with the speaker-role being identified with a disembodied voice; Wiltschko 2024).
This analysis provides a straightforward answer the question as to why we can treat ourselves as an other: it constitutes one of the affordances of our linguisticality. In other words, I can treat myself as an other because I can identify with both the speaker and the addressee role without affecting the real-world knowledge that I am a unified self. This implies that when we treat ourselves as an other, we necessarily treat ourselves as an addressee and not as any kind of other (a 3rd person perspective). This is evident from the fact that I cannot refer to myself with a 3rd person pronoun (*Martina, she can do it).
The cora goal of this talk is to present cross-linguistic evidence for this idea. In addition, I discuss several consequences of the proposal including the proper treatment of 2nd person, the relation between language and thought, and the conceptualization of SELF vs. OTHER.