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Recommended Citation

Gan, Amanda, “The Word of Thought and the Thought of Word: An Analysis and Translation of Lev Vygotsky’s Chapter Seven in “Thinking and Speech”” (2014). Senior Projects Spring 2014. 27. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2014/27

Bard College

Bard Digital Commons

Senior Projects Spring 2014 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2014

‌The Word of Thought and the Thought of Word: An Analysis and Translation of Lev Vygotsky’s Chapter Seven in “Thinking and Speech”

Amanda Gan

Bard College

Senior Project submitted to

The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

by Amanda Gan

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2014

Acknowledgments

Here are the many words I have always wanted to express to the following individuals but never had the courage to do so.

To Professor Marina Kostalevsky: Thank you for being a professor and an advisor. Thank you for teaching me Russian with such great patience and dedication. Your wisdom has generated beautiful thoughts and language instincts in me that boosted my acquaintance with Russian language. Your advice and guidance encouraged me to continue taking Russian each semester.

To Professor Olga Voronina: Thank you for playing multiple roles in developing me as an individual, translator, and student. Thank you for enforcing discipline and precision, and for setting time aside anytime and anywhere to listen to me. I will remember your words that i will remember for along my journey as a learner. You offered me more than just well made Russian “Blinnys”.

To Professor Oleg Minin: You have been more than just a professor; you are also a friend. Thank you for bringing me into Russian culture through many conversations and advices. Thank you for listening to me and making Russian language part of my life. You have encouraged me to express my thoughts through poetry, music, and films. Most importantly, thank you for putting together Russian speakers and bringing the energy and person to go to for support. A cup of tea and a simple chat makes me take a step further in pursuing Russian as a language.

To Professor Barbara Luka: Thank you for letting me know that I am talented and I can make it in Bard even if psychology is not my area, that I can be successful in what I do because I have a lot to offer. Because of you I had the courage to pursue Russian language. Your words and firm nods made me take risks and believed in myself, that this is the right thing. I will continue to take that spirit as I take on a job, or a responsibility. Thank you.

To Ola, Undrea, Kanat, Andres: Thank you for staying with me through thick and thin, knowing my every change and troubles, good and bad that I have been through in Bard. Thank you for being there and giving me emotional support. Thank you for believing that I can make it, that I deserve beautiful things, and thank you for your sincere words.

To Tim Rozhansky, Gleb Vinokurov, Alina Fillipova, Anton Bastov, Denys Bastov, Gia Bakubat, Albina Muzafarova, and other AUCA, Smol’ny students: Thank you for making me a Russian speaker and a Russian. Thank you for being so influential and being there when my Russian years are blooming. I look forward to our future encounters, and our past encounters will always be present in me.

To Ian Tripp: Thank you for taking my project seriously as though it is your very own and sitting down with me side by side, reading and correcting lines and every detail of my project while talking about the bigger picture. Your maturity and discipline as a sophomore is most outstanding and impressive. Your efforts and advice will always be a reminder as I continue to write in the future.

Contents

Introduction… 1

Translator’s note 15

Translation of Chapter Seven: Thought and Word… 21

Works Cited 63

Russian language was a stranger. I found him handsome, depressing, and difficult to read. There were French, German, and Czech and even Chinese but I somehow could not get him out of my mind. In his ugliness and harshness I see an unbearable sense of beauty. When we met again in a harsh winter in Saint Petersburg, he became disastrously romantic and monstrously embraceful. I guess I somehow fell in love with him and now he shall be my life long companion; it is a choice that I myself have made.

Introduction

Known as the “Mozart of Psychology”^[1], Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was born on the 5th of November 1896 in Orscha–a town in Belorussia–to a middle-class Jewish family. His father was a chief manager at the United Bank and his mother was a teacher. Being the second oldest among his eight siblings, Vygotsky had to help his parents to support the family financially.

During that time in the Russian empire, there were strict limits on the choice of professions Jews could obtain, as well as the regions they could live in. Due to the limited positions and education opportunities available to the Jews, it was difficult for Vygotsky to get a standard formal education as a child. Hence, he was home schooled in a Jewish tradition (e.g. Reading the Torah in Hebrew, delivering speech at his Bar Mitsva). Vygotsky’s parents were highly respected members of the Jewish community in Gomel. They were well educated in many fields, they both spoke more than one language, and they had a network of professionals. He started out by studying privately with the mathematician Solmon Ashpiz, and young Vygotsky’s abilities enabled him to advance to the Jewish gymnasium where he was award a gold medal. While in high school, Vygotsky started to love poetry of Pushkin, Heine, Mandel’shtam and Pasternak, and he often visited the theatre to watch performances. As an adolescent Vygotsky impressed many others as he quickly fell in with the local elite Jewish history study circle, where he encountered Hegelian theories for the first time. Vygotsky’s good friend Dobkin mentioned that Vygotsky was particularly active in discussing the idea of individual in history with other young intellectuals.

David Vygotsky, his cousin who was several years older than Lev Vygotsky, introduced him to the world of language and translation by leading Vygotsky into the Esperanto movement, where linguists shared a common profession as translators of languages that were especially popular at that time, such as Spanish, Russian and Hebrew.

Vygotsky was very intrigued by Hegel’s view on human history as a part of the world’s history, and how ideas are constructed in different cultures within the historical processes. Hence, Vygotsky adopted Hegelian approaches on the formation of concepts and ideas, and how people develop these. He also appreciated Hegel’s interpretation of a link between a subject and an object, whereby they are both interrelated and none of them really has a priority over the other. In general, Vygotsky’s Hegelian philosophical direction is derived from their mutual interest in the connection between an individual, a society, and a culture. Hegel is seen as an important influence in many of Vygotsky’s works and his name often appears in Vygotsky’s analyses.

Hegel’s influence motivated him to explore a wide range of topics throughout his years of education, and certainly guided Vygotsky towards the world of philosophy and psychology. Besides studying Hegel, Vygotsky had other academic interests such as languages and art. By the end of his high school education, he was able to read and speak German, Hebrew, French, English and Esperanto, as well as acquiring literacy in Latin and Greek. In addition to this, his love for art led him to theatre and literature. These talents served as a solid foundation to Vygotsky’s notion of the ideal occupation at that time–to become a teacher. However, this dream did not come true because this profession was “not meant to be” for the Jews. Hence he ended up turning into medicine as a profession and he was fortunate enough to get into Moscow University–which had an acceptance rate of 5%^[2] at that time, where he studied law and philosophy. Ultimately, he ended up in Shvyavsky Public University where he further enhanced his knowledge in the fields of teaching and art. He took courses in logic, psychology, art, as well as theatre. Vygotsky graduated during the time of the Russian revolution, just as WW1 was ending, and all the educational institutions were completely shattered.

The disturbing onset of the hereditary tuberculosis hit Vygotsky in 1920, just when his career started to bloom. He became concerned about the progress and preservation of his work, going so far as to take immediate action to send his manuscripts to his mentor, Yuli Aichenwald in preparation for his “spontaneous” death. While he was concerned about his health, he did not abandon his dream of becoming a teacher. He taught adult education in Russian in Gomel for seven years, and continued to grow as an educator through his teaching experience in the psychology lab and the Teachers Training Institute.

The field of psychology quickly advanced and that enabled Vygotsky focus more on his role as a theorist. Between 1921-1931, Vygotsky achieved a significant level of professional confidence as he began to capture the attention of some famous psychologists, who were impressed (among other things) by Vygotsky’s Marxist approach towards psychology, and his knowledge on the social interaction in human development. Being encouraged and supported by Alexander Luria and Alexei Leont’ev, Vygotsky regularly participated in both national and international conferences, where his professional network expanded extensively. He made his major “psychology debut” was at the meeting of the Second Psychological Congress in Leningrad in, where he gave his first important speech. This conference opened for him the doors to new spheres and he began to work with psychologists whose fields were related to his research. The flourishing of his career allowed him to travel around Europe, begin new projects, and complete his Ph.D. dissertation while co-authoring a number of books and articles with Luria.

Vygotsky had always kept his love for theatre in motion. He even made theatre a part of his career by co-directing films with Luria, in addition to carrying out seminars on art and film. Vygotsky was particularly interested in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system of “perezhivanie” (переживание) that is the concept of bringing one’s experience onto the stage, as opposed to the concept of “predstavlenia” (представления) based on a simple representation of a character.

Stanislavsky’s ideas corresponded to Vygotsky’s ideas of self, which he saw as the bridge that would lead to the study of emotion and linguistics through the portrayal of a subtext. This major theatrical concept contributed to Vygotsky’s linguistic analysis of the irregularities in our everyday language in comparison to metaphorical and poetic languages. In “Thinking and Speech” Vygotsky quoted Pushkin to say– “As rosy lips without a smile, Without grammatical errors, I will not love Russian language.” This reference reveals Vygotsky’s fascination with the complexity of a simple phrase, as its “real” underlying meaning might be entirely different from the speaker’s intention. With this interest in mind, he continued to explore the role of human consciousness– the subject that was of great interest to Vygotsky but which he was not able to pursue more deeply due to his worsening physiological condition.

Vygotsky has always been respected as a scholar whose creativity is revealed throughout his ideas on education, language acquisition, and social communication. Today, Vygotsky’s theories continue to play an important role in educational systems in Europe and America.

Several theories such as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Behaviorism, and his theories on pedagogy are particularly influential and well known because they are seen as useful cognitive “tools” in the process of evolving as an educated and developed person as well as understanding how society works. In “Educational Psychology”, Vygotsky mentioned, “The social environment is the true lever of the educational process, and the teacher’s overall role is reduced to adjusting this lever. Just as a gardener would be acting foolishly if he were to try to affect the growth of a plant by directly tugging at its roots with his hands from underneath the plant, so the teacher is in contradiction with the essential nature of education if he bends all his efforts at directly influencing the student. But the gardener affects the germination of his flowers by increasing the temperature, regulating the moisture, varying the relative position of neighboring plants, and selecting and mixing soils and fertilizers, i.e., once again, indirectly, by making appropriate changes to the environment.” This idea where a teacher acts as an educator through the variation of the student’s environment, which then leads the student to grow beyond his existing comfort zone. Vygotsky’s ideas have acquired historical and cultural significance but they were not readily accepted and approved by the Russian educators, who were focused on the concepts of “instruction” (obuchenie/обучение) and “upbringing”(vospitanie/воспитание). His theoretical contribution immediately provoked a battle over the educational methods in Russia because teachers, pedagogical institutes and students started to work together to transform their learning and teaching methods into a more interactive one.

In the 30s, Vygotsky’s work was banned in USSR–for only a “certain kind” of psychology was approved by Stalin’s regime. In his last years, Vygotsky volunteered to work with refugees (1931) and disabled people along with Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. He did so because he knew that his life was coming to an end. In 1934, at the age of 34,Vygotsky died of tuberculosis, leaving behind him 10 books, including “Thinking and Speech” and 270 seminal articles. His name only slowly gained popularity in Western Europe along with the development of the theories of some other psychologist such as Pavlov, Skinner, and Piaget. In 1980, Lev Vygotsky’s works and ideas reached the USA, and they immediately attracted and inspired numerous psychologists, students, and educators.

Vygotsky and Others

Vygotsky’s scholarly versatility paid off as his works gained access to fields related to child development, the role of culture, the relationship between language and thought, as well as the research of human consciousness. Over the years, Vygotsky’s works had serve as a foundation to a wide range of theories that had inspired many psychologists of various periods and schools. Due to the similarity of views, he was often associated with Jean Piaget, Karl Marx, Hegel, and William Stern. The theories of Vygotsky that most significantly contributed to contemporary psychology were his theories on the Social Influences in “Cognitive Development”, “The Zone of Proximal Development”, and “Language and Thought”. In addition to that, he contributed greatly to the studies of children’s learning capabilities in correlation with their environment. In fact, his theories are well practiced and shared throughout the world in the field of classroom pedagogy and all level of education. Vygotsky often placed the theoretical emphasizes on cooperative learning and “scaffolding”.^[3] As an educator, he also bridged the study of culture and child development through the exploration of a “different kind of empirical research.” He was known among other psychologists for his unconventional views on the nature of empirical studies. These views were presented in the form of analyses of the theories of other psychologists, whose ideas he found effective. Hence, besides being a psychologist, philosopher, a critic and an artist, Vygotsky also played a major role as a commentator on many analytical articles and books. He formally utilized these analyses and researches as references towards his arguments in polemics with phis fellow theorists. Many of his reviews and evaluations were concentrated on Karl Marx’s Social Theory, Jean Piaget’s Psychological Theory, Hegel’s Philosophical Theory, and William Stern’s Social Constructionism as he attempted to answer the question “What psychology do you study in Russia?”

Lev Vygotsky has always been a longtime supporter of Karl Marx’s ideas and he often used Karl Marx’s social theory as a foundation of his own theories. In other words, Karl Marx was Vygotsky’s guide onto the path of behaviorism (human-object cultural contact), through the study of psychoanalysis and scientific methodology. Besides Karl Marx, Hegel, also played an important part in Vygotsky’s profession as a psychologist and philosopher. Hegel’s expertise on the subject of the roles of history, concept, and ideas that are knitted together within one’s cultural context fit into Vygotsky’s own cultural theories. Like Hegel, Vygotsky supported the importance of culture in terms of how it shapes one’s thinking, depending on the nature of the subject matter. Due to his fascination by Hegel’s ideas Vygotsky prominently mentioned the German philosopher in his well-known book–“Thinking and Speech” (1934) in the last chapter titled “Thought and Word” (мысль и слово). When William Stern’s social constructionism was introduced, Vygotsky formed an opinion on Stern’s idea that the individuality is the true essence of personality and intelligence, not social construction. Stern became a powerful referee in Vygotsky’s writing, especially regarding Vygotsky’s analyses on children’s social behavior and language abilities that are consistently being shaped by their culture. Speaking of social behavior, the psychologist that has won the “most-compared to Vygotsky” award was none other than the renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget. Both Piaget and Vygotsky shared a very strong similarity on the question of children’s learning ability being heavily influenced by their learning environment. However, Piaget had been considered Vygotsky’s opponent because their perspectives also differ in many ways. Piaget is recognized for his description of the stages of child development. This contrasts Vygotsky’s emphasis on the cultural aspect of children’s’ cognitive development. This is because Vygotsky focused more on the specific social factors and especially the role of language, that he saw necessary for the understanding child cognition.

Having this point of view in mind, Vygotsky strongly emphasized the irrelevance of Piaget’s experiments on his (Piaget’s) own children because his results were not representative. That critical impulse prompted Vygotsky’s desire to test Piaget’s concept of egocentrism, and consequently, the roles of inner speech, outer speech, and egocentric speech.

To Vygotsky, the differences and similarities between the ideas of the psychologists (Piaget, Hegel, Stern, etc.) were all essential in order to comprehensively explore human consciousness. In general he sought to examine human consciousness by exploring language and thought through empirical studies on child development. Hence, even though he was close to the end of his life, Vygotsky addressed all that he needed to in a series of seven chapters, which constitute his last and most famous book- “Thinking and Speech.”

“Thinking and Speech” by Lev Vygotsky, 1934

In “Thinking and Speech”, Vygotsky aimed to explore thought and language through experimental investigation starting with the genetic analysis of thought and speech. The title of the book was changed several times. Its original title was “Thought and Language”, though in Russian the components of the title “Myshlenie i rech” (мышление и речь) itself meant the act of thinking and the noun “speech,” as opposed to the nouns “thought and language.” The questions were about what did Vygotsky actually have in mind when he gave the book the title, and how would the translators interpret his title?” This book is very complex not only because of the language Vygotsky used but also due to the fact that it is a critical discussion based study of a wide range of fields. In order to do this Vygotsky sequenced his range of studies into seven chapters. In these seven chapters Vygotsky addressed the challenges faced by psychology in general, in order to explore the nature of thought and language in depth. Many of those challenges emerged as a result of the methodological approaches that were used at that time. Vygotsky also made good use of the existing literature to demonstrate how the field of psycholinguistics and psychology had evolved and developed over the years. In general, his book greatly contributed to a new synthesis between the research psychology and the relationship between thought and language. Vygotsky also described the processes of child development in conformity with the formulation of concepts, and especially the role of written speech in relation to thinking. He believed that analyzing children’s speech development (inner speech, outer speech, and egocentric speech), it is possible to track their cognitive development. Moreover, their use of language (self-talk and identification of meaning) for communication also contributed to a clear understanding of a child’s thought. Of course ultimately, Vygotsky himself knew that due to the complex nature of thought and language, no one could possibly find a “right” and fully effective way to solve this problem because there are always too many issues that are left unaddressed or ignored by researchers. Not surprisingly, this book sparked an ongoing debate between psychologists because it covers many disciplines and human sciences. Ultimately, “Thinking and Speech” has successfully explored the changing relationship between the mental and verbal processes of thought and language through the study of the Western European philosophical, psychological, and linguistic concepts, as well as fostered Vygotsky’s own individual progress towards his theory of consciousness.

Chapter Seven, Thought and Word, and other chapters

I chose to translate Chapter Seven because it is regarded the most important chapter in “Thinking and Speech.” It is a chapter where questions like “Does language mirror thought?”, “Does language shape thought?” are posed and answered. To a lot of authors who have been spending the major part of their career exploring Vygotsky’s extraordinary role as a “modern” yet “Soviet” psychologist, this chapter addresses the deepest concepts that are hidden under the blanket of the relationship between thought and language. In addition to that, it is also a chapter where Vygotsky illustrated the most difficult philosophical concepts with metaphors, as he made use of the flexibility of Russian syntax. He moves from one psychologist to the next and from one metaphor to the next, but still manages to keep all chapters in harmony with the main goal of the examination of thought and language. For this reason, I chose to unify the brief summaries of chapters one through six into a more condensed yet thorough summary in chapter seven.

“Thinking and Speech” can be broken down into the follow chapters:

Chapter 1- Research methods and approaches to word and meaning Chapter 2/3 – A critique of Piaget’s and Stern’s child development theories Chapter 4- Trace of the genetic roots of thought and language

Chapter 5- Development of word meaning in child Chapter 6- A comparative Study of child concept

Chapter 7- A co-summary of chapter one through chapter six through the analysis of thought and word

Chapter seven is the final chapter and the introduction to the subject of consciousness. This chapter is the last written by Vygotsky before he died. By the end of Chapter seven, through the lenses of “Thinking and Speech,” we will be able to see the influences of Marx’s theory on Vygotsky’s experimental ideas about the historical and social context of child development.

Vygotsky’s investigated many themes that include the basic act of thinking, speaking, and meaning. For example, Vygotsky described meaning, as the preconditioned revolutionary activity for language making instead of a language tool. To answer more interrelated questions (which he did partially answer such as “What does language mean?” and “How is language completed in meaning?” Vygotsky poses a complex and detailed discussion of egocentric and social speech, as well as thought and meaning. His goal was not to simply address their difference, but to analyze their relationships separately, then place them along with each other. For example, he studied the notion of meaning in terms of the historical aspect of meaning making, and consequently, how this is related to object identification. To support this, he used his experiments on children’s linguistic learning abilities to emphasize the role of society in the process of meaning making. With this he laid a solid argument that children first learn how to make meaning, then proceed to assign the meanings to words in an organized manner. Through meaning, Vygotsky had successfully conveyed the influence of culture onto oneself in the detailed explanation of the notion of meaning. Throughout the summary of Chapter seven, many examples are provided, where he selected a concept which he saw as relevant to the development of thought and language, and thought several solid circumstances to support his argument. Due to the generality and diversity of concepts, the summary of Chapter seven is broken down into the sub analysis of three components- thought and word, language and thought, and speech planes.

Thought and word

Vygotsky started his analysis of Thought and Word by describing them as a united entity.

To turn our attention to the relationship between thought and word, he inserted a mediating concept, which is the concept of meaning. Vygotsky saw meaning as the explanatory unit of thought and word because the process of meaning making itself is a form of revolutionary development. The ability to form meaning defines us as humans as we practice dialectical thinking through collective intentions, our intentions, and the intentions of others. Word meaning (semantics), in this sense, was considered a significant sign of growth because it is the bridge between the cognitive mind and social development. In Vygotsky’s words, word meaning is not only the unit of thinking as speech; it is also a form of generalization. Generalization here is referring to human social interaction, which is considered the unity of thinking and communication.

Using the case of a child’s first word-meaning encounter, Vygotsky gave a simple example. In an experiment, a child was asked if it is possible to name a cow “ink,” and ink “cow.” The child gave a negative answer to this question because he understood the word “cow” as a living thing that gives milk, and an “ink” as something that people use to write with. Using the same logic, the child acknowledged a cow as “cow” because it has horns, and that a calf as “calf” because it has smaller horns than the cow, and a horse is not a cow because a horse does not have horns. The child demonstrated a movement of thought to word. Theoretically speaking, Vygotsky explained that the external (auditory) speech plane and the internal (semantic) speech plane must be studied, in order to understand this “movement” of thought to word completely. Working from the external speech plane, the child could listen, then deduce from a part to a whole. On the contrary, working from the external semantic point of view, he or she may first intuitively integrate a thought as a phrase, and then slowly break it down to separate words. Certainly, these actions are complex enough that the child himself cannot realize them, but the point is that, these two planes exist and they are crucial for the discovery of the path from thought to word. Hence, Vygotsky noted that meaning is “The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought; that is why words cannot be put on by thought like a tailored garment” (1986, p.219). In addition to that, this experiment also demonstrated the crucial word-object relationship, whereby the word is inseparable from the object. The mastery of a child’s ability to mentally dissect speech into these two planes can be considered as their mastery of the portioning of semantics and phonology. Similarly, once the child understood that the word does not necessarily relate to the characteristics of the object, then the child may be considered to have matured linguistically, and thus, be prepared to take into account the environment in which he uses his language.

The conclusion Vygotsky gives to the role of meaning in the path from thought to word, is that meaning shows us how we learn from one another, and how we naturally adapt to each another on a daily basis, through language. Thus, meaning is necessary as a historically preconditioned learning phenomenon. The ideal way to understand the relationship between thought and word is to understand the mediating concept of meaning.

On the Translation:

It is generally assumed that translation is simply an act of rewriting a piece of text from its original language to a target language. As an individual who started learning Russian three years ago, this project was by far the biggest test of my academic journey. Often times one might think that since I speak Malay, Chinese, English, and a little bit of French, adding Russian language to my “plate of languages” should not be a struggle. This might have been the case but the “struggle” came not from the language, but from the nature of translation itself. As Russian novelist and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once said “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.” The act of translation itself requires more than just the words on the text. In this case, translation requires a mastery of both Russian and English to an extent where I can tackle the cultural, lexical, structural, and ambiguous aspect of both these languages. Disciplining myself to do research and understand the content of “Thinking and Speech” was not the main difficulty. The two most emotionally challenging yet rewarding struggles that I faced while completing this project can be broken down into two sub challenges.

The first problem I had was the difficulty to work with the agglutinative and flexible nature of Russian while trying to be loyal to the Vygotsky’s intention and every single artistic aspect of the text. The second problem I encountered was a constant inability to stay focus on Vygotsky’s language because his sentences are long and at times confusing. These two problems definitely troubled my confidence as a translator and a language learner because I struggled with both the content and my main task, which is the translation itself. In my mind I was certain that these problems were challenging because I was working with two languages that were not my native languages. Though this was an obstacle, knowing different kinds of languages enabled me to draw comparisons between different language backgrounds in terms of finding a balance between the syntax and semantics of both Russian and English. Having additional language structures in my mind gives way to the multicultural proficiency and transparency of grammar and idioms. In addition to that, I have never encountered a material as dense as this text, which Vygotsky himself had written.

What makes this task almost unbearable yet fascinating is Vygotsky’s writing style. The abundance of linguistic nuances and metaphors and untranslatable idioms (непереводимые- ‘neperevodimie’) exceeded my expectations of a typical academic text. By the end of the first page itself, I began to alter my way of thinking and writing in both English and Russian. There were linguistic “bombs” dropped on every possible aspect of both of these languages that it was almost harder to read Vygotsky’s work than to translate it. In addition to that, Vygotsky’s work as a psychologist, critic, and thinker required more clarification and focus on the meaning behind each sentence that he wrote. By the end of this project I could not rely on my sense of English as my target language to detect which sentences sounded wrong and which sounded right (in English) because I became too acquainted with Vygotsky’s style of writing. While working my way through this difficult path, I realized that the main challenge was not Russian, but the idea of transposing Russian into English while reducing the ambiguity of Vygotsky’s language.

Vygotsky’s attempt to tackle the issues of thought and word in relation to scientists and literary figures (Dostoevsky, Piaget, Mandelshtam, etc.) explained his motivation to write an academic book with a mindset of a poetic psycholinguist. Writing about the process of thinking and speaking sparked some irony since it involves a more intense emphasis of the process of “thinking” and “speaking” itself. This meta-analytical effort of Vygotsky certainly made my task an intriguing and life-changing experience. However, his writing style (especially with reflexive verbs and long run on sentences) makes it harder for readers to penetrate into the core of the text because of its insufficient clarity increases the distance between Vygotsky’s text and his readers (or translators). There was a wide range of techniques and aspects of translation that I had to pay a good amount of attention to in order to solve certain translational problems that emerged. Most of my efforts were concentrated on the addition and subtraction of words, paraphrasing, and translations of metaphors.

I have chosen a few paragraphs in both Russian and English to highlight the linguistic challenges of this translation project. The italicized sentences are sentences that I have translated from the original Russian text.

1. В самом деле, сказать, что вода состоит из водорода и кислорода, значит сказать нечто такое, что одинаково относится ко всей воде вообще и ко всем ее свойствам в равной мере: к Великому океану в такой же мере, как к дождевой капле, к свойству воды тушить огонь в такой же мере, как к закону Архимеда.

   Indeed, to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen is to say nothing similar to all which applies to water in general as well as all of its consistent properties: to the great ocean in the same degree as to a rain drop, to the water’s ability to extinguish fire, in the same extent as to Archimedes’ law.

   This sentence is an example of how Vygotsky makes use of Russian’s dative case by introducing a new category. It is not common in English to simply put “to” in front of the beginning of each clause. It is also not common to use the phrase “is to say nothing similar to all that applies”. The usage of “that which” is very common in Russian. In American English, it brings out formality. Vygotsky also that flooded each paragraph with many transitional devices (conjunctive adverbs). This may easily confuse readers as he overemphasized on the introduction of what had been said earlier instead of starting off his sentence with a new argument.

    

2. Речь по своему строению не представляет собой простого зеркального отражения строения мысли. Поэтому она не может надеваться на мысль, как готовое платье.

   Speech, by its own structure, does not present itself as a simple mirror reflection of the structure of thought. Hence, it cannot be worn on thought like a tailored dress.

   This paragraph is an example of reformulation and transposition where I had to a highlight the importance of the role of speech. In English “because” is not allowed to be placed at the beginning of the sentence, which is why “hence” is used instead. Another interesting fact about this sentence is that Vygotsky is describing the characteristics of speech and how it cannot simply be put on as a piece of clothing. In a way, he personifies speech. “tailored dress” might be confusing because it literally means “prepared dress”. There are other variants of the word “made” in Russian and I came across some translations that simply omitted this important word and replaced the whole phrase with “clothing” or “garment.” I chose “tailored dress” because I believe that Vygotsky’s goal was to present the analogy whereby a dress may be put together by separated parts and it can be pre-made in a specific way, otherwise he could have chosen the word “clothing” or “garment” in Russian, instead of specifically referring to a “dress”.

3. Анализ слова мог бы показать, что это несовпадение грамматики и логики в развитии детской речи опять, как и в прежнем случае, не только не исключает их единства, но, напротив, только оно и делает возможным это внутреннее единство значения.

   The analysis of the word may demonstrate that this grammatical and logical mismatch in a child’s speech once again–as it was in the previous case–not only does it not exclude their unity but instead, it is the only one that makes the internal unity of meaning and the word that expresses the complicated logical relationship, possible.

   This sentence is an example of antonymic translation; sentence fragmentation and sentence integration whereby I had to split up or conjoin sentences together in order to preserve the meaning of the sentence. The hyphens here show a case of interjection rather than a comma. There is also a trick in the double negative and opposing statement that occurs in a very rare occasion. For example, the phrases “does not only not exclude their unity” and “but, on the contrary, it is the only one that does” make sense in Russian, but for it to make sense in English, I have to either translate part of a clause without negation and omit a detail, or switch a word-order. Vygotsky also uses a lot of double negative phrases that are common construction of Chinese “ I need to go” “我不得不走” (Wǒ bùdébù zǒu) and French “rien”. For example in Russian it is acceptable to say “ We cannot not talk about this.” “Мы не можем не поговорить об этом.” However, these two sentences could be translated as “I had to go” or “We have to talk about this” because “cannot not” in this case does not imply that one cannot talk about something, but it is rather used as an emphasis on the urgency of the action.

    

4. Небезразлично, думается нам, говорю ли я себе или другим.

   It makes a difference as we think of whether we are talking to ourselves or to others.

   This sentence is a clear example of structural change and commentary. The Russian original of this sentence literally translates “It makes a difference, we think (reflexive form) whether we speak to myself or to others.” There are many similar cases in the rest of this chapter whereby the common usage of reflexive verbs in Russian require a structural change and a subsequent commentary towards a particular phrase in English so that readers would not get lost. For example, my initial impression of this sentence is that I wonder if we talk to others or ourselves when we talk, rather than we, as human beings think: “do I talk to myself or to others.” It forces me to pose a question in both languages to see which one corresponds better.

    

5. «Вот», — сказал он и написал начальные буквы: «К, В, М, О, Э, Н, М, Б, 3, Л, Э, Н, И. Т». Буквы эти значили: «Когда вы мне ответили: этого не может быть, значило ли это никогда или тогда?»

   “Now,”- he said and wrote the beginning letters: W,Y A, M: T, I, N, P, D , I, M, A, T, O, N?”

   These words mean “ When you answered me: This is not possible.

   “Did it mean anything then or ever? ”

   This paragraph is one of the most interesting to translate because the paragraph itself describes how one person has to guess what another is saying by only revealing the initial letter. It is also an except from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, from which Vygotsky quoted. The techniques used here are compensation, compression, and modulation whereby I have to paraphrase or completely come up with the closest possible meaning. The word “Vot” or “Вот” in Russian could mean “Here” or “Now”. It is a short word but yet it functions as a distractor or transitional device. The last two sentences could be understood as “when you answered me that this is not possible, did it mean something then or did it ever mean anything, ever?” However, since my goal was to keep the dialogue parallel, I shrunk this phrase into a more straightforward phrase that I think carries the closest meaning. My goal was to achieve a certain balance between how a dialogue should look, the amount of words used in a dialogue, as well as the meaning each word weighed.

    

6. Сознание отображает себя в слове, как солнце в малой капле вод. Слово относится к сознанию, как малый мир к большому, как живая клетка к организму, как атом к космосу. Оно и есть малый мир сознания. Осмысленное слово есть микрокосм человеческого сознания.

Consciousness displays itself in the word, as the sun does in the small drops of water. The word is related to consciousness, as the small word is to the bigger word, as the living cell is to the organism, as the atom to the cosmos. It is the small word of consciousness. The meaningful word is the microorganism of human consciousness.

This paragraph is an example of literal translation where word order and word sequence in both versions are in the same. The only change here a grammatical change. The meaning is reflected in a straightforward manner. This was also the final paragraph of the chapter.

In general, Vygotsky’s uses of run on sentences, commas, and words that created ambiguity (“Emergence” Возникование,“Dismembering” Расчленять) and his intensive use of repetition and constant reference to concepts that he had previously mentioned may easily lose my focus as a reader. I inserted a number of ellipses to draw readers’ attention to Vygotsky’s main arguments, as I believed that it reduces ambiguity. To tackle the linguistic differences between English and Russian, mainly grammar and syntax, the techniques that were frequently used were omission, generalization, transposition, literal translation, and modulation. In addition to those that are described above, these techniques were used to achieve coherence and cohesion as well as increase readers’ accessibility towards Vygotsky’s intentions as an author. Though challenging, this project enabled me to greatly both my Russian and English language skills to the level of my native languages; nothing but the most rewarding learning process as a college senior and a language learner.

Thinking and Speech. Lev Vygotsky 1934

Chapter 7 Thought and Word

“I forgot the word that I wanted to say, and the unbodied thought will return to the hall of shadows.”

O.E. Mandelshtam, The Swallow

We began our research with an attempt to clarify the internal relationship that exists between thought and word in the most extreme stages of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. We found that the beginning of the development of thought and word, the prehistoric period in the existence of thinking and speech, does not show any definite relationships and dependencies between the genetic roots of thought and word. Thus, it appears that the inner relationship between word and thought that concerns us is neither primordial, nor is it a pre-given value which appears to be a precondition, foundation, and starting point for all further development. Instead they themselves arise and are formed only in the process of the historical development of human consciousness. They do not appear to be a precondition but the product of the formation of mankind. Even at the supreme point of animal development (the anthropoids), the speech, which is quite humanlike in the phonetic relations, is not in any way related to the (also the anthropoid’s) intellect. In the initial stage of child development we may undoubtedly ascertain the presence of pre-intellectual stage in the process of speech formation and the preverbal stage in the development of thinking. Thought and word are not inherently related to each other. This bond emerges, changes, and grows in the course of the very development of thought and word.

However, at the same time it would be incorrect, as we have attempted to clarify at the very beginning of our research, to represent thought and speech as two external processes with respect to one another, as two independent forces that flow and function parallel to each other or that intersect in some points of their respective paths and fall into a mechanical interaction. The absence of a primal connection between thought and word does not in any way indicate that this connection can only emerge as an external connection of two essentially different types of activity of our consciousness. On the contrary, as we tried to demonstrate in the very beginning of our work, the basic methodological flaws of the vast body of research on thinking and speech are the flaws that stimulated the fruitlessness of these works and the flaws that consist precisely in this understanding of the relationship between thought and word that consider both these processes as two independent, separate and isolated elements, where verbal thinking, with all of its inherent properties, emerges from their external unification.

We have attempted to show that the method of analysis that flows out of this understanding appears to be a failure from the outset as it dissolves this whole into its forming elements, in order to explain the properties of verbal thinking, to speech and thinking that do not contain the characteristics that are inherent to the whole. It thereby denies itself a path ahead towards the explanation of these properties. We compared the researcher who uses this method to one who decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen in attempt to explain why water extinguishes fire. Surprisingly he observed that oxygen sustains combustion, while hydrogen itself is combustible. We continued to show further, that the analysis that uses the method of dissolution of elements is not essentially the analysis in the purest sense of the word but in terms of its application to the solution of concrete problems in any particular area of the phenomena.

Instead, this is a raising of the phenomenon to a more general level rather than the inner partitioning of the phenomenon that is the underlying explanation. By its own nature this method leads more towards a generalization than it does to an analysis. Indeed, to say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen is to say nothing similar to all which applies to water in general as well as all of its consistent properties: to the great ocean in the same degree as to a rain drop, to the water’s ability to extinguish fire, in the same extent as to Archimedes’ law. Precisely in the same way, to say that verbal thinking contains intellectual processes and speech functions (themselves), is to say something that is related to verbal thinking as a whole and to all of its separate properties in the same extent. It therefore means that it is to say nothing regarding each particular problem that is faced by the research of verbal thinking.

Hence, we tried to embark on a new point of view from the beginning by assigning to the whole problem a different direction and applying a different method of analysis in the research. We attempted to replace the analysis, which is based on the method of dissolution into elements, with the analysis that separate the complicated whole of verbal thinking into units, understanding by these latter(s) the kinds of products of the analysis that form the initial aspects of the moments not in relation to phenomenon as a whole, but only in relation to its separate concrete aspects and properties. Furthermore, similarly, in the distinction from the elements, they do not lose the properties that are inherent to the whole and the properties that are subjected to the explanation. Instead, they contain in the most simple and primitive form, the properties of the whole, for whose sake the experiment is undertaken. The unit, towards which we come into the analysis, contains the simplest form of properties that are inherent to the verbal thinking as a whole.

We found this unit, which reflects the unity of thinking and speech in the simplest form, in the meaning of a word. The meaning of word, as we have tried to show previously, presents itself as a unit of both processes that cannot be further deconstructed. That is, we cannot say that it (the meaning of a word) is the phenomenon of speech or the phenomenon of thinking. A word, deprived of meaning, is not a word, but an empty sound. Therefore, meaning is the necessary, constituting attribute of the word itself. It is the word itself, observed from the inside. Therefore we seem to be in the right to reasonably consider it as the phenomenon of speech. However, from the psychological aspect the meaning of word, as we have repeatedly seen throughout the research, is nothing other than a generalization or a concept. The generalization and meaning of word are synonyms in essence. Any generalization, any form of a concept is the most specific, the most genuine, and the most unquestionable act of thought. Therefore, we are correct in regarding the meaning of word as the phenomenon of thinking.

Thus, the meaning of a word turns out to be a speech phenomenon and an intellectual phenomenon simultaneously, wherein it does not simply indicate its external co-existence with two different forms of mental life. The meaning of word is the phenomenon of thinking only in the sense in which thought is related to the word and when thought is embodied in word, and vice versa: it is the phenomenon of speech only to the extent that speech is related to thought and is illuminated by it. It is the phenomenon of verbal thought or the phenomenon of the meaningful word. It is the unity of word and thought. It seems to us that this basic thesis of our research as a whole is barely needed in the new confirmations after all that were mentioned above.

It seems to us that our experimental research completely confirmed and justified this thesis, having shown that while operating with the meaning of word as a unit of verbal thinking, we actually find the real possibility of the concrete research of the development of verbal thinking and the explanation of its leading features at various stages. However, the main result of all of our research is not the thesis itself, but that which we found further in the research itself, as its most important and central conclusion. That which is new and most significant, which introduces the study of thinking and speech, is the discovery of the development of the meaning of words. The discovery of the change of word meaning and its development is our main discovery that allowed us to overcome the postulate of the consistency and unchangability of word meaning which lay in the foundation of the previous studies of thinking and speech for the first time. From the perspective of traditional psychology, the connection between word and meaning is a simple associative connection that is established by virtue of multiple correspondences in the consciousness of the impression from a word and of the impression from a thing that the word denotes. The word reminds one of its meaning as the coat of a familiar person reminds one of the person, or as the external view of the house reminds one of those who live in it. From this point of view, once the meaning of word is established, it cannot at all develop, nor can it change.

Association, connecting word and meaning, may be strengthened or weakened, and it may be enriched through the connections with the objects of the same kind. It may also be extended by means of the similarity and adjacency to a wider circle of objects. Either that, or likewise, it may be narrow or expand this circle. In other words, it may undergo a series of quantitative and outer changes, but it cannot change its internal psychological nature because in order for that to happen, it has to stop being what it is, which is association. […]

First of all, our analysis leads us to the differentiation of planes in the speech itself.

Though the research shows that through the internal, meaningful, semantic aspect of speech and the external, auditory, phasic aspect of speech forms a complete unity, they each possess their own unique laws of movement. The unity of speech is a complex unity, and not a homogenous and uniform one. To begin with, the presence of its movement in the semantic and phasic path of speech is discovered in the whole series of factors that lead to the formation of the child’s verbal development. We will only specify two of the main factors.

It is known that the external aspect of speech is developed in the child from a word to a chain of two or three words, followed by a simple phrase, then to a chain of phrases, and – even later– to the related speech which consists of a series of complex sentences. In this sense, the child goes into the mastering of the phasic aspect of speech from parts to a whole. However, we also know that in terms of its own meaning, the first word of the child is a whole phrase-a single complex sentence. In the development of the semantic aspect of speech, the child begins from the whole, the sentence. Only later then, he moves to the mastering of the particular meaningful units, meanings of separate words, dismembering his own thought that is fused and expressed in a one- word sentence, into a series of separate series that are connected between the verbal meaning themselves. Thus, if we cover the initial and final moment in the development of the semantic and phasic aspects of speech, it may be easily verified that this development occurs in opposing directions. The meaningful aspect of speech develops from a whole to a part, from a sentence to word, while the outer aspect of speech goes from a part to a whole, from a word to a sentence.

This very fact itself is already sufficient to convince us of the necessity to distinguish between the direction of meaningful and auditory aspect of speech. The direction in this plane and the other do not correspond to each other, merging into a single line. As shown in the case we have observed, they may take place in opposite directions. However, this certainly does not imply that there is a gap between both speech planes that are autonomous and independent of each of its two sides. On the contrary, the differentiation between both these planes is the first and necessary step for the establishment of the inner unity of the two verbal planes. This unity proposes that each of the two aspects of speech has its own direction and a complex relationship between both these directions. However, it is only possible to study the relationship that lies on the basis of the unity of speech with the aid of the analysis of the differentiation of its paths, between which these complex relationships can only then exist. If both of these aspects of speech presented themselves as identical, corresponding with each other and merging into one line, then it would not be possible to speak about any kind of relationships on the internal side of speech because it is impossible to have a relationship between a thing and itself. In our example, this inner unity of both these sides of speech, having an opposing direction in the process of child development, acts with no lesser clarity than their discrepancy with one another. Initially, the thought of a child was born as a vague and disassociated whole, which is precisely why he has to find his own expression in the part of the speech in a separate word. It is as though a child chooses the size of the verbal garment for his thought. To the extent that the child’s thought is dismembered and moved to the constitution of separate parts, is the extent of which the child moves from parts to a dismembered whole in speech. Conversely, to the extent of which the child moves in speech from parts to a disassociated whole to a sentence, he may move from a dismembered whole to parts in thought. Thus, from the very beginning, thought and word do not appear to occur in one form. In a sense, it can be said that between them exists more of an opposition than an agreement. Speech, by its own structure, does not present itself as a simple mirror reflection of the structure of thought. Hence, it cannot be worn on thought like a tailored dress. Speech does not serve as the expression of a developed thought. Thought, turning into speech, is restructured and reformed. Thought is not expressed but committed in word. Hence, the opposite directions of the process of the development of the meaningful and auditory aspects of speech form a true unity precisely because of its opposing directions. Another fact that is no less important refers to the later phase of development. As we remembered, Piaget established that the child masters the complex structure of the subordinate sentence with the conjunctions such as “because,” “despite,” “since,” “although,” rather than the meaningful structures that correspond with these syntactic forms. The grammar in the child’s development occurs ahead of his logic. The child who absolutely correctly and adequately applies the conjunctions that express the causal, temporal, adversative, conditional and other dependencies, in his own spontaneous speech and in the corresponding situation, and also throughout the course of the schooling age, is not aware of the semantic aspect of these conjunctions. He is not able to randomly use them. This means that the direction of the semantic and phasic aspects of the word in the mastering of complex syntactic structures does not correspond in the development. The analysis of the word may demonstrate that this grammatical and logical mismatch in a child’s speech once again–as it was in the previous case–not only does it not exclude their unity but instead, it is the only one that makes the internal unity of meaning and the word that expresses the complicated logical relationship possible. The lack of correspondence of the semantic and phasic sides of speech acts less indirectly but more vividly in the functional development of thought. In order to discover this, we have to move our own analysis from the genetic plane to a functional one. However, we must first note the existing facts that we highlighted from the genesis of speech allowed us to draw several significant conclusions in the functional relationship. If, as we observed, the development of the meaningful and auditory aspects of speech occurs in opposing directions throughout early childhood, then it is completely understood that in each occurring moment, no matter where, we will not be able to detect a correlation of these two speech planes. No complete correspondence can ever be proven between them. However, more illustrative facts can be derived directly from the functional analysis of speech. These facts are well known to the modern form of psycholinguistics. Out of all the series of relevant facts, the lack of correspondence of the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate has to be situated in the first place. […]

The lack of correspondence of the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate may be even more distinctively clarified in the next example. Let us take the phrase “The clock fell,” in which “the clock”– subject, “fell” – predicate. We imagine to ourselves that this phrase is used in two different situations and subsequently, it expresses two different thoughts in this one form. I turn my attention to the situation whereby the clock has stopped and I ask, how did this happen. They answered me: “The clock fell.” In this case, to my knowledge there was an introduction about the clock earlier. In this situation, the clock is the psychological subject that is being discussed. The presentation of the fact that the clock fell comes second. “Fell” in this current situation is the psychological predicate, that is said about the subject. In this case the grammatical and psychological division of the phrases correspond, though it may not necessarily respond.

Working at the desk, I hear a noise from a falling object and ask what fell. I am answered with this very phrase: “ The clock fell.” In this case, there was a representation of the act of falling in the consciousness before. “Fell” here is that which is discussed in this phrase–the psychological subject. That which is being said about the subject, the second thing that arises into awareness, is the presentation of the clock, which will be the psychological predicate in the current situation. In fact, this thought could be expressed as: “What fell was the clock.” In this scenario both the psychological and grammatical predicate would coincide. They did not correspond in our given situation. The analysis demonstrates that in the complex phrase, any part of the sentence may be a psychological predicate, and will bear the logical emphasis. The semantic function of this logical emphasis is exactly the isolation of the psychological predicate. Paulhan says “The grammatical category is, to a certain extent, presented as the fossilization of the psychological category.” Hence, it needs to be revived by a logical emphasis that brings out its semantic structure. Paulhan demonstrated how the most spiritually originally-diverse opinion can be hidden behind this one very grammatical structure. Perhaps the correspondence between the grammatical and psychological structures does not happen as often as we think they would. In actuality, it might even be simply postulated by us and perhaps it rarely or never occurs.

Everywhere– in phonetics, morphology, lexicon, and semantics, even in rhythm, metrics, and music–the psychological categories are hidden behind the grammatical or formal categories. If, in one case, they apparently correspond with one another, then they will diverge again in other cases. Not only can we speak of the psychological elements of forms and meanings, but with the psychological subjects and predicates, with the very same logic we could also speak of the psychological number, gender, case, pronouns, superlatives and tenses, etc. Along with the grammatical and formal understanding of the subject, the predicate and the gender we have to permit the existence of their psychological counterparts, or preimages. That which appears to be a mistake from a linguistic point of view may have an artistic value if it emerges from a distinctive nature. In the words of Pushkin: “Like rosy lips without a smile, I do not like Russian speech without grammatical errors.” This has a more profound meaning than we usually think. The complete elimination of the incongruities for the benefit of the common and undoubtedly correct expression can only be found in mathematics. Apparently, Descartes was the first person that saw that this kind of thinking in mathematics has originated from language, but nevertheless surpassed it. The first person who saw thinking as an origin of language, but has nonetheless been surpassed it, was apparently Descartes. Only one thing can be said: in its grammatical oscillation and in its psychological incongruity, our common conversational language is in the state of the dynamic equilibrium between the ideals of the mathematical and imaginative harmony, in the continuous movement, which we call evolution. If all these examples were shown by us in order to demonstrate the lack of correspondence of the phasic and semantic aspects of speech, then altogether they show that this lack of correspondence of word not only does not exclude this unity, but on the contrary, it proposes this unity with certainty. Since this lack of correspondence does not interfere with the existence of thought in word, it appears to be a necessary condition in order for the movement from word to thought to be realized. […] In the fable “The Dragonfly and the Ant,” Krylov substituted the dragonfly for La Fontaine’s grasshopper, giving it the inapplicable epithet “the jumper.” In French, the word grasshopper is feminine. It is therefore quite suitable to embody the female frivolity and carelessness in his form. However, in Russian, in the translation “the grasshopper and the ant,” this meaningful tone in the image of frivolity inevitably vanishes. Hence, Krylov has prevailed the grammatical gender onto the real meaning- the grasshopper appeared to be the dragonfly, nevertheless preserved all the features of the grasshopper (jumping, singing) even though the dragonfly does not jump nor sing. The adequate translation of the complete sense demanded an indispensable preservation and the grammatical category of the feminine gender for the hero of the fable. […]

If the phasic and semantic aspects of speech do not correspond, it is obvious that verbal utterance cannot immediately grow to its maximum since the semantic and verbal syntax grow, as we saw, not at the same time and not together, but instead imply a transition and a direction from one to the other. However, this complex process of the transition from meaning to sound itself develops, forming one of the basic lines in completion of verbal thinking. This division of speech into semantics and phonology is not directly given from the very beginning but it arises only in the course of the development: children must differentiate both forms of speech and recognize their differences and each of their natures in order to make the descent down the steps, which is naturally assumed in the active process of meaningful speech possible. We initially encounter a child’s unawareness of verbal forms and meanings and the lack of differentiation between them. The word and its auditory structure is perceived by the child as part of a thing or as its property, inseparable from its other properties. Apparently, this is a phenomenon that is inherent to any given primitive linguistic consciousness.

Humboldt provides the anecdote that talks about a peasant, whom, while listening to the conversation of the astronomy students talking about stars, turned to them with the question: “ I understand that with the aid of all devices, people have succeeded in measuring the distance from Earth to the most distant stars and knew their distribution and movement. However, I would like to know how did they knew of the names of the stars?” He presumed that the names of the stars may only be known from the stars themselves. Simple experiments with children demonstrate that while at a preschool age, children can explain the name of the objects as their properties: “ a cow is called a cow because it has horns, “a calf” because it has smaller horns, “a horse”– because it has no horns, “a dog” because it has no horns and it is small, “a car”- “because it is not an animal at all. ”

The question of whether or not a name of one object may be changed to another, for example, to name a cow an ink, while an ink a cow, the children answered that this is completely impossible because we write with ink while “cow” gives milk. The characteristics of the thing and its name are so closely and inseparably related between each other that to transfer the name of one thing almost means to transfer the very property of one thing onto the other. The difficulty of the child to transfer the name of one thing onto the other is visible through the experiments in which the conditions of the names of the object were established with false names based on the instructions. In the experiment, the names cow and dog as well as window and ink were interchanged. A child was asked: “If the dog has horns, does the dog give milk?” “It gives.” said the child. “Does the cow have horns?” –“It does.” –“The cow– it is a dog, but perhaps the dog has a horn?”–“Of course, once a dog is a cow, once it is called a cow, then there have to be horns.

Once it is called a cow, it means that there have to be horns. As for the dog, which is called a cow, there must certainly be small horns.” […]

` On one hand, the denotation of word is expressed more clearly and strongly in the child, compared to the one that is expressed in an adult: to a child, a word represents part of a thing, one of its properties; it is immeasurably more closely related with the objects, compared to the word of an adult. This determines a greater relative weight of denotation in the words of children. On the other hand, due to the exact fact whereby in the child’s perspective the word is related more closely to the object in comparison to us, the word is presented as a part of a thing. It is easier for the child than for the adult to isolate the word from the object and replace it independently of thoughts and to live an independent life. In this sense, the child initially does not differentiate the verbal meaning and the object, the meaning and the auditory form of the word. In the course of the development this differentiation occurs in the extent of the development of the generalization, and in the end of the development, where we already encounter the original concepts, all these complex relationships emerge between the separated speech plans that we talked about earlier.

This differentiation of the two planes that expands over the years is accompanied by the development of the path that breaks through a thought upon the transformation of the syntax of meaning into the syntax of words. Thought imprints a logical emphasis onto one of its word phrases, isolating the psychological predicate with it, without which any given phrase will be incomprehensible. Speaking demands the transition from the internal plan to the external plan, while understanding proposes the reverse direction form the outer plan of speech towards the inner plane. We must take one more step on the path we have charted, and penetrate even deeper into the inner aspect of speech. The semantic speech plane is only the beginning and first of all of its inner planes. Behind the semantic plane, before the research, lies the plane of inner speech. Without the correct understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech there will not be any kind of possibility to clarify the relationship of thought to word in all of their actual complexity. However, this problem is presented as perhaps the most confusing out of all the questions that related to the study of thinking and speech. Hence, is worthy of a completely special research but we cannot avoid addressing some basic data of this particular research of inner speech since we would not be able to represent the relationship of thought to word without them.

The confusion begins with the unclear terminology. The term “inner speech,” or “endophasia,” is applied in scientific literature to the most diverse phenomena. From this arises the whole series of misunderstandings as the researchers often argue about different things, naming them with the same term. There is no possibility to bring our knowledge of the nature of inner speech into any kind of system if earlier on there was no attempt to introduce the terminological clarification into question. Since this task has not yet been done by anyone, it is not surprising that until now we do not have a single author of any kind of systematic theory, describing even the simplest factual data regarding the nature of inner speech. Apparently, the initial meaning of this term was the understanding of inner speech as verbal memory. One can recite a learnt poem by heart but one can reproduce it only in memory. The word may also be substituted by the representation about it or the form of memory, as the case of any other given object. In this case, inner speech differs from outer speech in the same way as the representation of the object differs from the real object. Precisely in this sense the French authors understood inner speech in their studies of the forms of memory, through which the reproduction of the word is realized (i.e., autistic, optical, motoric, or synthetic images). As we will see below, verbal memory represents one of the features that define the nature of inner speech. However, of course, not only does memory alone not deplete this concept, but also it does not even directly correspond to it. We also find the sign of equality between the reproduction of words by memory and inner speech among the traditional authors. In fact, these are two different processes that should be differentiated.

The second meaning of inner speech is related with the reduction of the common verbal act. In this case inner speech is called unpronounced, silent, and mute speech, which is speech minus sound, by Miller’s definition. According to Watson’s characterization, inner speech presents itself as outer speech, but only as an incompletion of it. Bekhterev defined it as a non- manifestation in the movement of the part of speech reflex, while Sechenov defined it as reflex that is broken into two thirds along its course. Hence, this understanding of inner speech may be included into one of the subordinate features in the scientific concept of inner speech. As the previous one, it does not deplete the whole of this concept, nor does it correspond to it at all. To mutely pronounce any kind of word still does not, in any manner, signify the processes of inner speech. More recently, Schelling proposed to terminologically delineate inner speech and inner speaking, denoting with this previous term the content that was just discovered in inner speech by the aforementioned authors. From inner speech, this concept is separated quantitatively so that it only has the active part of the speech but not the processes of speech activity in mind. It is qualitatively separated so that it initially works with the motor activity of speech functions. Inner speaking, from this point of view, is the partial function of inner speech, speech-motor act of the initial character, the impulse that is not completely expressed in articulatory movements or that which is manifested in the movements that are expressed silently and vaguely, but which can yet accompany, reinforce, or inhibit the cognitive function.

In the end, the third and most vague of all understandings of this term gives inner speech an extremely broad interpretation of the concept. We will not stop on its history but we will briefly illustrate its contemporary condition, with which we have encountered in the works of many authors. […] The correct understanding of inner speech must precede from the theory whereby inner speech is a basic formation by its psychological nature, a basic form of speech activity, having its own specific features and consisting of the complex relationship towards other forms of speech activities. In order to study these relationships of inner speech, on one hand towards thought, and on the other, towards word, it is necessary to first find its specific differences from both thought and word then clarify its completely unique function. It is not the same, I think, whether I am talking to myself or to others. Inner speech is a speech for oneself.

External speech is the speech for others. It should not even be presumed that this core and fundamental difference in the functions of both kinds of speeches to remain without consequences for the structural nature of both speech functions. […] The matter here is not a matter of vocalization. The very presence or absence of vocalization is not the reason that explains the nature of inner speech to us but the research that stems from this nature. In a way, it can be said that inner speech is not only that, which follows outer speech or that, which is reproduced in memory, but the opposite to the outer speech. Outer speech is the process of the transfer of thought to word, its materialization and objectification. Here–the opposing process that occurs from the outside towards the inside is the process of the vaporization of speech into thought. This is the origin of the structure of this speech with all its differences from the structure of outer speech.

Perhaps inner speech presents itself as the most difficult form of psychological research.

Precisely because of this, we find a large amount of completely arbitrary and speculative constructions in the study of inner speech and we do not have any possible factual data. The experiment towards this problem is carried out demonstratively. The researchers attempted to grasp the existence of the central field of inner speech which is merely notable–in best case– three-staged by its own significance and in any case that which lies outside of the central field of inner speech of the relating motor changes in articulation and respiration. This problem has remained almost inaccessible to the experiment until now, as the genetic method has been applied towards it. Here then, development is shown as the key to the understanding of one of the most complicated inner functions of human consciousness. Hence, the finding of the adequate research method of inner speech has indeed moved the entire problem from a dead point. Therefore, we first stop to analyze the method.

Apparently Piaget was the first to pay attention to the basic function of a child’s egocentric speech, and he was able to evaluate it in terms of its theoretical significance. His contribution lies in the fact that he did not pass by this routinely repeated fact that is familiar to each individual who has seen the child. Instead, he attempted to study the fact theoretically.

However, he also remained completely blind to the most important characteristics of egocentric speech, that is, precisely to its genetic origins and its connection with inner speech. On this account, he falsely interpreted its own nature with functional, structural, and genetic aspects.

Starting off from Piaget, we moved to the center of our research, precisely onto the problem of the relationship of egocentric speech with inner speech. We believe that for the first time, this leads us to the possibility of studying the nature of inner speech experimentally with an unprecedented completeness.

Previously, we had already outlined all the basic considerations, compelling us to conclude that egocentric speech presents itself as a series of stages that precede the development of inner speech. As we remember, these considerations were of three classifications: functional (we found that egocentric speech performs the intellectual functions as inner speech does), structural (we found that egocentric speech is similar to inner speech in terms of its structure), and innate (we compared Piaget’s established fact of the atrophying of egocentric speech to the moment of the occurrence of schooling age with a series of factors that forces an attribution to the beginning of the development of inner speech, and from here we conclude that on the threshold of schooling age, the atrophying of egocentric speech does not occur, but its transition and regrowth into inner speech does.) This new working hypothesis on the structure, function and fate of egocentric speech gave us the possibility to not only restructure the whole study of egocentric speech in a radical form, but also allows us to penetrate the question regarding the nature of inner speech in depth. If our presumption that egocentric speech presents itself as the earlier forms of inner speech is trustworthy, then the question regarding the method of the research of inner speech is therefore answered. […] From this understanding of the nature of egocentric speech, Piaget’s view follows onto the structure, function and fate of this form of speech. In egocentric speech, the child must not adapt to the thought of the adult; hence his thought stays egocentric to a maximum level, that it finds its own expression in the incomprehensibility of egocentric speech for the other in its brevity, and for its other structural features. In terms of function, in this case, egocentric speech may not be anything but a simple accompaniment, accompanying the basic melody of child activity and with no changes in this very melody. This is rather an accompanying phenomenon than a phenomenon that has a independent functional meaning. This speech does not carry out any function in the child’s behavior and thinking. In the end, as long as it appears to be the expression of the child’s egocentrism, the latter doom into extinction in the course of child development, it is natural that its genetic fate is also a deletion that is parallel to the deletion of egocentrism in the thought of the child. Hence, the development of egocentric speech moves along a falling curve, a vertex that is located in the beginning of the development which falls to null on the verge of the schooling age. Hence, we can talk about egocentric speech with the words of Liszt regarding the wunderkinds (child prodigy) that all its future is in the past. Egocentric speech does not have a future. It does not arise; nor does it develop together with the child.

Instead, it withers and fades away, presenting itself as rather involutionary by nature, rather than an evolutionary process. If, in this sense, the development of egocentric speech occurs along an incessantly fading curve, then it is natural that at any given stage of child development this speech arises from the insufficiency of the socialization of child’s speech that is initially individualistic, and appears as a direct expression of the stage of this insufficiency, and incompleteness of socialization. In accordance with the opposing theory, the child’s egocentric speech presents itself as one of the phenomena of the transition from the inter-mental function to the intra-mental one, that is, from the social form, the child’s collective activity, to his individual functions.

As we have shown in one of our earlier works, this transition appears to be the general law for the development of all the higher mental functions that initially emerge as the forms or activities in the collaboration. Only then, the child is transferred into the sphere of his own mental forms of activity. The speech for oneself initially arises along the path of the differentiation of the social function of speech for others. The main track of child development appears to be not the gradual socialization that is brought into the child from outside, but the gradual individualization, emerging on the basis of the child’s internal socialization. Thus, following this perspective, our views on the question regarding the structure, function and fate of egocentric speech change. It seems to us that its (egocentric speech’s) structure develops parallel to the isolation of its function and in correspondence to its functions. In other words, acquiring a new purpose, speech is naturally reconstructed in its structure in accordance to the new functions. We stop in detail

below on these structural features. We simply say that these features do not fade away, nor do they smoothen out. They do not decrease to nothing but they strengthen and grow. They evolve and develop together with the age of the child so that their development, as all of egocentric speech’s, then, occurs not along the falling curve but along the rising curve. […]

Inner speech is the muted and silent speech. This is its basic distinction. However, precisely in this direction, in the sense of the graduation growth of this distinction the evolution of egocentric speech occurs. Its vocalization fails to null and it becomes a muted speech.

However, this has to necessarily be the case if it presents itself as the earlier genetic stages in the development of inner speech. The fact that this feature gradually emerges, that egocentric speech isolates in the functional and structural relationship earlier than it does in the relationship of vocalization indicates that which we have laid our basis on in our hypothesis on the development of inner speech- precisely that inner speech does not grow along the path of the external weakening of its vocal aspect, transitioning from a speech to a whisper and from a whisper to a silent speech. Instead, it grows along the path of the functional and structural weakening from outer speech, the transition from it to the egocentric speech and from egocentric speech to inner speech. In this sense, the contradiction between the fading away of the outer manifestation of egocentric speech and the growth of its inner features turn out to be an apparent contradiction. In fact, behind the falling of the coefficient of egocentric speech hides the positive development of one if the central features of inner speech—the abstraction from the voiced aspect of speech, and the final differentiation of inner speech and outer speech. Hence, all three of these basic groups of features (functional, structural and genetic) are known facts to us, from the form of the development of egocentric speech (including Piaget’s facts) according to the saying regarding the one and very matter: the egocentric speech develops in the direction towards inner speech, and the entire course of its development cannot be understood otherwise- as the course of the gradual progressive growth of all the main distinctive properties of inner speech. […] This is the kind of question that was standing before our experiment. To set off with the points for its construction,

we have chosen the moments that are noted by Piaget himself in egocentric speech, and consequently, not presenting any kind of doubt in the sense of their factual implements towards the circle of the phenomena that we have studied. Even though Piaget does not give these incidents any kind of theoretical connotation, rather describing them as the outer features of egocentric speech, these three features of egocentric speech impressed us from the very beginning:

1. It presents itself as a collective monologue, that is, it appears to be none other than how it does in the child’s collective with the existence of other children, occupied by this very activity and not when the child is left alone on his own.
2. Where this collective monologue is accompanied by the illusion of understanding (as Piaget noted); where the child believes and assumes that those around him understand the egocentric expressions that he addresses to no one.
3. In the end, the fact that this speech for oneself posses the character of outer speech, completely resembling the socialized speech, and he (the child) does not vaguely annunciate to himself in a whisper to himself.

All three of these existing features cannot be a coincidence. From the child’s point of view, egocentric speech is not even subjectively separated from social speech (the illusion of understanding), and not objective in terms of a situation (collective monologue) and a form (vocalization). It is not separated and isolated form social speech. This itself already did not incline our view into the direction of the study regarding the insufficient socialization as the origin of egocentric speech. These features of speech are rather considered in the favor of the excessive socialization and the insufficient isolation of the speech for oneself from the speech of others. After all, they say that egocentric speech, the speech for oneself, flows in the objective and subjective conditions that are inherent of the social speech for others. The fact that our evaluation of these three features does not appear to be the consequence of the previous thought, it is apparent from the similar evaluation without any experimentation, and only on the basis of the interpretation of the very data of Piaget himself, who approaches Grünbaum, with whom we cannot disagree in this case. He says that there is a case, in which the surficial observation forces us to think that the child is absorbed into himself. This false impression emerges from that which we expect from the three-year-old child’s logical relationship towards his surroundings. Since this kind of relationship towards the reality is not natural to the child, we may easily assume that he lives in the immersion of individual thought and fantasy, and that he is characterized by the egocentric setting. During the course of cooperative play, three to five year old children are often occupied with their individual selves, and often only speak to themselves. If from a distance this produces the impression of the conversation, then with a closer approach this turns out to be a collective monologue, parts of which are not subservient to the other, and neither do they answer one another. However, ultimately, it would seem that the clearest example of the child’s egocentric setting appears to be, in fact, the proof of the social connectivity of the child’s mind.

The deliberate isolation from the collective or the autism, in the sense of contemporary psychiatry, does not take place in the collective monologue. In fact, they appear to be directly opposite to this. Piaget, who strongly emphasizes the child’s egocentrism and takes it as the cornerstone of his whole theory of the child’s mental characteristics, has yet to recognize that during the collective monologue, children believe that they are talking to each other and that they listen to each other. It is true that they behave themselves as though they do not pay attention to others, but only because they believe that each of their thought that is not altogether or insufficiently expressed is nevertheless an overall property. In Grünbaum’s view, this appears to be a proof of the insufficient isolation of a child’s individual mind from the social whole.

In the first series of experiments we attempted to destroy the illusion that arises with the egocentric speech of the child in terms of his understanding towards other children. To do this we placed the child, the coefficient of egocentric speech, of which was previously changed, in the situation that is completely similar to Piaget’s experiments. Piaget, on the other hand: either organized his (the child’s) activity in a collective of non-speaking and deaf children, or placed the child in a collective of children who spoke a language other than his. As for the remaining conditions, the situation is left unchanged in terms of its structure, as well as all the details. The variable in our experiment appears to be only the illusion of understanding, naturally emerging in the first situation, and it is excluded beforehand in the second situation. How did egocentric speech act with the exclusion of the illusion of understanding? Experiments demonstrated that its coefficient in the critical experiment without the illusion of understanding rapidly fell, while majority of the cases reached zero, whilst in the other remaining situations it was reduced eight times on average.

In the second series of experiments, we introduced the collective monologue of the child as the variable upon the transition from the basic to the critical experiment. Once again the coefficient of egocentric speech initially changed in the basic situation, in which this phenomenon emerged in the form of a collective monologue. Then, the child’s activity is transferred into a different situation, where the possibility of the collective monologue is excluded or after which the child is placed in the midst of unfamiliar children, with whom he had not converse neither before, after nor during the course of the experiment. Either this, or that whereby the child s placed in isolation from the children by another table in the corner of the room, or in the case where he worked completely alone, outside of the collective, or in the end, where the experiment left midway through the experiment, leaving the child alone though preserving himself the possibility to see and listen to the child. The general results of these experiments completely agree with those that were lead to us in the first series of experiments. […]

In the end, in the third series of our experiments, we chose the vocalization of the egocentric speech to be our variable with the transition from the basic to the critical experiments. After the change of the coefficient of egocentric speech in the basic situation, the child transferred into another situation in which the possibility of vocalization was difficult or excluded. The child seated himself distantly from others, and he also seated himself with big gaps in another hall, or behind the wall of the laboratory in which the experiment was carried out, where the orchestra produced such a voice that it completely drowned not only the voice of others, but his own voice; and in the end, the child was specifically instructed to speak loudly and he was asked to carry out a conversation none other than with a soft and soundless whisper. In all of these critical experiments we once again observed that which was observed in the first two cases with remarkable regularity: the rapid fall of the curve of the coefficient of egocentric speech downward. It is true, that in these experiments the reduction of coefficient was expression a little more complicatedly than it was in the second experiment. […]

In all of the three series we pursued the one and very goal: we took into basis the research of these three phenomena that arise with almost every egocentric speech of the child: the illusion of understanding, collective monologue, and vocalization. These three phenomena appear to be general to egocentric speech and social speech. We experimentally compared the situations of the presence and absence of these phenomena and observed that the exclusion of these features that bring the speech for oneself together with the speech for others, inevitably leads to the fading of egocentric speech. From here we are right to conclude that the child’s egocentric speech is already differentiated in the functional and structural relationship, as a special speech form that still has not been ultimately separated from social speech, from where it developed and matured all the time. […]

The study of the psychological nature of inner speech with the aid of this method, which we attempted to experimentally generalized, lead us to the conviction that the inner speech should be considered not as speech minus sound, but as a speech function that is unique in its structure and function that it is organized completely differently than outer speech, which is located in this latest inseparable and dynamic unit of transitions from one plane to the other. The first and main feature of inner speech appears to be its completely unique syntax. Studying the syntax of inner speech in the child’s egocentric speech, we noticed one essential feature that discovers the certain dynamic tendency of the growth with the extent of egocentric speech. This feature is manifested in the apparent fragmentation and abbreviation of inner speech in relation to outer speech. […]

A completely analogical phenomenon is observed in the child’s egocentric speech with the only difference that it advances before us, transitioning from age to age in this manner to the extent that the approximation of the egocentric speech reaches its maximum towards inner speech on the threshold of the school age. The study of the dynamics of its growth does not leave any kind of doubt on the fact that, if this curve were to continue further, it must, in its limits, lead us to the reduction of the incomprehensibility, abbreviation, and the reduction of inner speech.

However, the whole benefit of the study of egocentric speech, is, in this case, what we are able to tract step by step, how these features of inner speech grow from the first stage to the last. As Piaget noted, egocentric speech also turns out to be incomprehensible if we do not know the situation in which it grows. It could also turn out to be abbreviated and reduced in relation to outer speech. […]

In order to clarify this primary feature, it is necessary to compare it to the analogical picture that arises in the specific situations in outer speech. The clear predicativity arises in outer speech in two basic situations, as our observations demonstrate: either in the situation of the answer or in the situation where the subject of discussion is known to both interlocutors. Towards the question on whether you want a cup of tea, no one will answer in the expanded phrase: “ No, I do not want a cup of tea.” The answer will be a clear predicate “No.” It will be inclusive of only one predicate. It is obvious that this kind of predicative sentence is only possibly because of its subject which was discussed in the sentence and implied by the interlocutors. This also precisely applies to the question “Has your brother read the book?”, as it is never preceded by the answer “Yes, my brother read this book”. Instead it is clearly preceded by the predicative answer “Yes” or “He read.”

A completely analogical proposal is created in the second case- in the situation where the subject predicate is known to the interlocutors in advance. We imagine that a few people are waiting by the tram stop for the tram “B,” in order to travel in a certain respective direction.

Never once had any of these people, having noticed the tram, says in the full phrase “The B Tram, which we await, in order to get to somewhere, is coming”, though the statement will always be reduced to one predicate “It is coming” or “B.” Obviously, in this case, the clear predicative sentence emerged in the live speech only because the subject and the word that designates it is directly known from the situation in which the interlocutors were in. Often the corresponding predicative judgments give rise to the comical misunderstandings and different kinds of quid pro quo, due to the fact that the listener relates the predicate statement not to the subject that was in the mind of the speaker but to another subject that is contained in his thought. In both cases the pure predicativity arises when the subject predicate is contained in the thoughts of the interlocutors. If their thoughts correspond and they both have the same thing in mind, then the understanding is fully carried out with the help of the one and only predicate. If this predicate is referred to different subjects in their minds, an inevitable misunderstanding emerges. […]

We find many clear examples of these kinds of reductions of outer speech and its information to a single predicate in the novels of Tolstoy, who has repeatedly returned to the psychology of understanding. “ No one heard what he (The dying Nikolai Levin. – L.V.) said, only Kity understood.” She understood because she constantly followed the thought of what he needs. We may say that, in her thoughts, having followed the thought of the dying person was the subject towards which the word that no one had understood was related. But perhaps the most notable example appears to be the explanation of Kitty and Levin through the beginning letters of words.

“ I have been longing to ask you for one thing.” “Please, ask.”

“Now,”- he said and wrote the beginning letters: W,Y A, M: T, I, N, P, D , I, M, A, T, O, N ?”

These words mean “ When you answered me: This is not possible. “Did it mean anything then or ever? ”

There was not any kind of probability that she may understand this complicated phrase.

“ I understood”. She said, having blushed.

“What is this word?” – He said, referring to “N”, which meant the word “never.” “This word means “never,” – she said – but this is not true.”

He quickly wiped off the writing, fell, gave her the chalk and got up. She wrote “T, I, C, N, H, U, O.” He suddenly beamed, and understood. This meant, “Then I could not have understood otherwise.”

She wrote the beginning letters “S, T, Y, C, F, A, F, W, H.”

This meant, “ So that you could forget and forgive what happened.”

He seized the chalk with intense trembling fingers and having broken it, he wrote the next beginning letters “I have to forget and forgive. I did not stop loving you.”

“I understood,” she said in a whisper.

He sat down and wrote another phrase. She understood everything, not asking him. She took the chalk and answered at that very instant. For a long time he could understand what she wrote, and often glanced into her eyes. He noted happiness. He could not howsoever fill in the words that she had in mind but in her charming and shining eyes that are filled with happiness, she understood all that he needed to know. He then wrote three letters. Though he had not finished writing, she already read beyond his hand and finished and wrote the answer herself: “Yes.” Everything was mentioned in their conversation; it was mentioned that she loves him and that she tells her father and mother that tomorrow he will come in the morning”(Anna Karenina, Part 4, Chapter 13).

This example has a completely exclusive psychological connotation because the whole episode of the love confession between Levin and Kitty is borrowed by Tolstoy from his own biography. It was precisely in this manner where he himself confessed his love to C.A. Bers, his future wife.

This example, like the previous one, has the closest relationship towards the phenomenon that interests us, the phenomenon that is central to the whole of inner speech: the problem of its abbreviation. With the same thoughts of the interlocutors, the role of verbal stimulation decreases to the minimum with the same direction. However, between these, the understanding occurs unmistakably. Tolstoy turns our attention to the different work, onto the fact that between humans who live in a very grand psychological contact, the understanding with the aid of only abbreviated speech, with half words appears to be a rule, rather than an exclusion. “ Levin is already now used to bravely speaking his own mind, not giving himself the difficulty to invest in exact words: He knew, that his wife, as of these very intimate moments, will understand what he wants to say with a hint, and she understood him.” […]

The deaf called the deaf to court before the deaf judge. The deaf shouted, “My cow is stolen by him!”^[4] “Have mercy” The deaf cried to him and answered: “This wasteland is still owned by my late grandfather.” The judge decided, “For what do both of you brothers go against each other. Neither one of you is guilty, but the girl is to blame.”

If we compare these two extreme situations- the explanation of Kitty and Levin, and the trial of the deaf people, we will find two poles, between which the phenomenon of the abbreviation of outer speech interchanges. This is what interests us. In the situation of the presence of the general subject in the thoughts of the interlocutors, the understanding is fully carried out with the aid of the maximally abbreviated speech from the edge with the simplified syntax; in the opposing case the understanding is completely not achieved even through expanded speech. Hence, sometimes it is unable to come to terms between not only these three deaf people, but also simply between any two people who are investing a different connotation in the one and very word or those who are standing on opposing perspectives. As Tolstoy said, all people who think independently and privately are taut towards the understanding of the thought of others, and they are particularly biased towards their own. On the contrary, the understanding in half-words, which Tolstoy sees as laconic and clear, is possible for people who are in contact. They can communicate the most complex thoughts almost without any words. […]

Recently, in linguistics the problem of the functional diversity of speech has appeared as one of the main problems. Even from the perspective of a linguist, language turns out to not be a united form of speech activity, but a summation of diverse speech functions. The view of language from a functional point of view, from the view of the condition and the whole speech utterance, was in the center of attention of the researchers. Humboldt already clearly recognized the functional diversity of speech in the context of the language of poetry and prose, which can never properly merge in their own direction and differences of each other because the poem is inseparable from music while the prose is presented exclusively to language. In Humboldt’s view, prose here is differed by the fact that language is used in the speech by their own advantages but by rightfully subordinating them to the dominating goal in this case; through the submission and combination of sentences in the prose, there develops a logical eurhythmy of thought in a very distinct way, in which the prosaic speech is adjusted by its own purpose. In both speech forms, language has its own features in the selection of an expression in the usage of grammatical forms and syntactic methods of the merging of words in speech. […]

The dialogue always assumes the interlocutors’ knowledge of the core of the matter, which, as we observed, allows the whole series of abbreviation in oral speech and creates a clear predicative statement in certain situations. The dialogue always presupposes the visual perception of the interlocutor, his mimics and gestures and acoustic perception of the whole aspect of speech intonation. Together, these facts allow the understanding through half-words (hints) and the communication with the aid of signs, the examples of which we lead to earlier. Only in oral speech do we find the kind of conversation where (as stated by Tarde) speech appears to be only a supplement to the interchanging glances between the interlocutors. Since we already discussed the tendency of oral speech towards the abbreviation earlier, we will point out the acoustic aspect of speech and take the classical example of Dostoevsky’s writing, which demonstrates the extent that the intonation facilitates the subtle differentiations in the understanding of word meaning.

Dostoevsky narrates about the language of the drunks that consists quite simply of one of a single non-lexical noun.

“Once upon a time on a Sunday, when the evening arrived, we happened to talk alongside a crowd of six drunken workers from fifteen steps. I was suddenly convinced that all thoughts, sensations and even a whole chain of deep reasoning could be expressed to the extreme of this very single short noun. So one man very sharply and energetically pronounces this noun, in order to express something that occurred as a common speech among them earlier, his very most contemptuous rejection. The other answered him with the very same noun, but already in a completely different tone and sense,- precisely in the sense of the full doubt in the validity of the rejection of the first man. The third man suddenly comes into resentment against the first man, sharply and recklessly cuts into the conversation and shouted the very same noun to him, but in an abusive and opprobrious sense. Then the second cuts into the conversation in resentment towards the third man, to the offender, once again and stops him in this sense: “ What did you say? Why did you fly in like this, fellow? We were peacefully discussing and from where did you come in climbing the mountain of swears?”

So then all this thought was spoken with these very words, with one reserved word, by the same extremely monosyllabic name of an object, except that he only raised the hand and took the third man by the shoulder. However, suddenly the fourth man appeared, the youngest of all men, who was silent until now, should suddenly searching around for the solution of the difficulty that had initially given rise to the argument. In delight, raising his hand he shouts “Eureka” You think that he has found it? Has he? No, it is no “Eureka” at all, and he has not found it; he only repeats the very same non-lexical noun, the one and only word, just one word, but only with delight, with the shriek of ecstasy and it seems to be too strong because this was disliked by the sixth, most sullen and oldest man. In a flash he upsets the naïve delight of the young man, addressing him and repeating with sullen and instructive bass. “Yes, all this is the same, the noun that is forbidden in front of the ladies, which however, clearly and exactly meant “what are you yelling about? Fighting your voice” And so, not blurting another single word, they repeated the one and only favorite word of theirs six times in a row, one after another and understood each other completely. This is a fact that I have witnessed. […]

It is completely understood that written speech in this case, is the opposing pole of oral speech. In written speech the situation that is clear to both interlocutors and all the possibility of the expressions of intonations, mimics, and gests are absent beforehand. Consequently, here, the possibility of all abbreviations, of which we talked about in relation towards oral speech, is excluded in advance. Here the understanding occurs on the account of the words and their combination. Written speech promotes the flow of speech in the order of a complex activity.

Here, verbal activity is defined as complex. This underlines the use of rough drafts. The path from a “rough draft” to a “clear copy” is the path of a complex activity. However, even with the absence of a factual draft, the moment of reflection in written speech is very strong; we very often talk to ourselves first, then we write; here there is a thoughtful draft. This thoughtful draft of written speech is indeed, as we attempted to demonstrate in the previous chapter, inner speech.

This speech plays the role of an inner draft in oral speech as well as in written speech. We must therefore compare the tendency for abbreviation in inner speech with that of oral speech and written speech. […]

We will begin from this second direction: the comparison of inner speech to oral and written speech especially because this path has already been followed through by us until the very end and that it has already been outlined by us all for the final clarification of thought. The whole matter is included in the fact that these very circumstances that sometimes create the possibility of pure predicative judgments, and that are completely absent in written speech, appear to be consistent and unchanging companions of inner speech, inseparable from it. Hence, the very tendency towards the predicativity must inevitably emerge, and as the experiment shows, it inevitably arises in inner speech as a constant phenomenon, and moreover, in its very pure and absolute form. Hence, if written speech appears to be the opposite pole of oral speech in the sense of the maximal expansion and complete absence of the conditions that cause the absence of the predicate in oral speech, inner speech then appears to be the opposite pole of oral speech, but in the reverse connotation since the absolute and consistent predicativity dominates within it. Oral speech, in this sense, occupies the mediating place between written speech on the one hand, and inner speech on the other. We have a closer look at these conditions that contribute towards the abbreviation of inner speech. […] We always know what the dialogue in our inner speech is about. We are always in the course of our inner situation. The theme of our inner dialogue is always known to us. We know what we are thinking about. The subject of our inner judgment is always there in our thoughts. It is always implied. Piaget somehow notes that we easily believe in the word ourselves, and hence the demand in the proofs and ability to justify our own thought emerges only in the process of collision of our thoughts with foreign thoughts. By this very law we may say that we easily understand ourselves through half-words, with hints. In the speech that flows with itself, we are always in a situation that emerges in the oral dialogue and the examples towards which we led earlier. From time to time, this occurs more like an exception than a rule. If we return to these examples, it may be said that inner speech always, precisely as a rule, flow in such a situation when the speaker utters the whole judgment on the tram stop with one short predicate “B”. Indeed we are always in our expectation and intentions in the course. We ourselves never have the need to resort towards the expanded formulas:

“The B tram, which we await in order to get to somewhere, is coming”. Here, only the one predicate always turns out to be necessary and sufficient. The subject always remains in the mind, similarly to how the remainders over ten remain in a student’s mind when he is doing addition. […]

Our analysis leads us to another conclusion: secondly, it demonstrates that the functional change of speech necessarily leads to the change of its very structure. Once again, that which is noted in inner speech is only the more or less the weakly expressed tendency towards the structural changes under the influence of the functional features of speech, which is observed and brought to its limits in inner speech in the absolute form. The function of inner speech, as we may establish it in the genetic and experimental research, steadily and systematically leads towards that whereby egocentric speech, initially differing from social speech only a functional sense, gradually, in the extent of the growth of this functional differentiation, is changed in its very own structure, reaching up to its limit to the full abolition of the syntax of oral speech. If we return to the direct research on the structural features of inner speech from this comparison of inner speech to oral speech, we may trace, step by step, the growth of the predicativity. In the very beginning, egocentric speech is still completely merged with social speech structurally. […]

Towards the moment of its extinction and transmitting into inner speech it already reproduces the impression of fragmentary speech since it is already almost subordinated to a clear predicative syntax. The observations during the experiments demonstrate when, through which manner, and from which source this new syntax of inner speech arises. The child speaks about that which is happening in front of him. Hence, he releases, reduces, and condenses the subject and the designating word more and more. More and more the child reduces his own speech up till the one predicate. The significant pattern which we were able to establish in the result of these experiments consists in the following: the more egocentric speech is expressed as such in its own functional connotation, the more clearly the features of its syntax appear in the sense of its simplification and predicativity. If to compare the child’s egocentric speech in our experiments in these situations whereby it performed in a specific role of inner speech as a means of understanding upon the interferences and difficulties that are experimentally caused, with these situations and when it appeared within this function is the case, we may undoubtedly establish that the stronger the specific, intellectual function of inner speech is expressed as such, the more distinctly will the features of its syntactic structure be. However, this predicativity of inner speech still does not deplete itself of all these complex phenomena that find their total external expression in the abbreviation of inner speech relative to oral speech. When we attempt to analyze this complicated phenomena we find that the whole series of structural features of inner speech upon which we only focused on the main points–is hidden behind it. Primarily, here the reduction of the phonetic features of speech, with which we have already encountered in many cases of the abbreviation of oral speech, should be addressed. The exchange between Kitty and Levin, the long conversation which was carried out through the initial letters of the words, and the guessing of the whole phrase, already allowed us to conclude that with the same directional awareness, the role of verbal interference decreases to the minimum (the beginning letters) while the understanding occurs unmistakably. However, this reduction towards the minimum of the role of verbal interference was similarly led to the limit, and it was observed almost in an absolute form in inner speech because the identical directionality of the existing consciousness reaches its fullness. In fact, in inner speech there always exists the situation that appears to be a rare and surprising exclusion in oral speech. In inner speech we are always located in the situation of Kitty and Levin’s conversation. Hence, in inner speech we always play the secretary, as the old prince names this conversation, all which is built on the guessing of the complicated phrases through the beginning letters. We find this analogy regarding the conversation in the Lemetre’s researches of inner speech surprising. One of Lemetre’s studies was about twelve year olds’ thought on the phrase “Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles” in the orders of the letters: L, m, n, d, l, S, s, b, behind which stands the looming line of the mountain (41. Pg5). In the very beginning of the formation of inner speech, we find that the manner of the abbreviation of speech is completely illogical: the reduction of the phonetic aspect of the word to the beginning letters, as it took place in the conversation of Kitty and Levin. In inner speech we never have the necessity to pronounce the words fully. We already understand by the intention itself, the kind of words we have to pronounce. With the comparison of these two examples, we do not want to say that in inner speech words are always occupied with the beginning letters and that this speech is expanded with the aid of the kind of mechanism, which turned out to be identical in both situations. We have in mind something more general. We only want to say that which is similar in oral speech: the role of verbal interference is reduced to the minimum in oral speech where there is a shared orientation of consciousness, as it took place in the Kitty and Levin’s conversation; similarly to the case whereby in inner speech the reduction of the phonetic aspect of speech takes place always consistently as a general rule. Inner speech, in this exact sense, is a speech almost without words. Precisely due to this, the correspondence of our examples seems significant to us; where in the known rare cases in both oral and inner speech, the words are reduced to the beginning letters, in both cases it turns out to be completely possible for the identical mechanism to convince us even more in the inner relativity of the phenomenon of oral speech and inner speech that is being compared. […]

We clarify this difference between the meaning and the sense of the word in the example of Krylov’s fable “ The dragonfly and the Ant”. The word “float,” with which this fable ends, has a completely definite and consistent meaning, identical for any given context, in which it is encountered. However, in the context of the fable, it acquires a much wider intellectual and effective thought. […] A word acquires, absorbs from the whole context, into which it is interwoven, intellectual and affective continent and it will start to mean either more or less than the meaning that it consists of when we consider it separately and outside of the context: more- because its circle of meaning expands, acquiring yet a whole series of zones that are filled with new content; less-because the abstract meaning of the word is limited and narrowed by that which the word signifies in the present context. The sense of the word, Paulhan says, is a complicated, malleable, gradually changing to a certain extent with separate consciousness and for that one and very consciousness in response to the circumstances. In this relation the sense of a word is inexhaustible. The word acquires its own sense only in the phrase, but the very phrase acquires the sense only in the context of the paragraph; the paragraph in the context of the book; the book- in the text of the whole creation of the author. The real sense of each word is ultimately defined with all the richness of the existing features in consciousness, attributed towards that (meaning) which is expressed through the present word. Paulhan says “The sense of the earth–it is the sun system which complements the representation of the earth; the sense of the solar system-it is the Milky Way, while the sense of the Milky Way- it means that we will never know the full sense of something and consequently, the full sense of any kind of word. The word is the inexhaustible source of new problems. The sense of a word never appears to be full. Ultimately, it rests in the understanding of the word and in the inner structure of the personality as a whole.” […]

In fact, the infusion of the diverse semantic content into a single word presents itself as a form of an individual, untranslatable meaning every time, (i.e. idioms). That which was introduced in the classic example of Dostoevsky that we have shown occurs here. That which occurred in the conversation of the six drunken workmen, and that appears to be excluded from outer speech, appears to be a rule for inner speech. In inner speech we can always express all the thoughts, feelings, as well as whole deep reasoning, with only one title. And of course, in the case of the meaning of this single title for the complex thoughts, the feelings and reasoning would be untranslatable onto the language of outer speech; they would be incomparable with the normal meaning of this very word. Due to this idiomatic character or all of the semantics of inner speech, it naturally turns out to be incomprehensible and hardly translatable into our ordinary language.

On this we may conclude the overview of the features of inner speech, which we observed in our experiments. We can only say that we may initially ascertain all these features through the experimental research of egocentric speech, but for the interpretation of these facts we resort to their comparison with the analogous and kindred facts in the form of inner speech. Not only was this important to us not only as the path of the generalization of the factors that we found but consequently, the correct interpretation, not only as the means to clarify the complex and subtle features of inner speech through the examples of oral speech, but mainly because the comparison demonstrated that the possibility of the formation of these features are already included in outer speech. It thereby confirmed our hypothesis on the genesis of inner speech from egocentric speech and outer speech. It is important that all these features may arise along the familiar conditions in outer speech; it is important that it is generally possible that the tendency towards the predicativity; towards the reduction of the phasic aspect of speech, the predominance of the sense over word meaning, the agglutination of the semantic units as well as the influence of sense and the idiomaticity of speech may be observed in inner speech. Consequently, the nature and laws of the word allow this and make this possible. This, we repeat, appears in our view as the best confirmation of our hypothesis regarding the origin of inner speech through the path of the differentiation of the child’s egocentric speech and social speech. […]

This new plane of verbal thinking is the thought itself. The first task of our analysis appears to be the isolation of this plane; dismembering it from this very unit in which it is always encountered. We already discussed that any given thought seeks to unite something with something else. It has a movement, a part, a deployment, that establishes a relationship between two things with one word that fulfills a kind of function, a work, and it solves a kind of task. This course and movement of thought do not directly and straightforwardly correspond to the expanded speech. The units of thought and the units of speech do not correspond. These processes reveal a unit, but not an identity. They are related to each other through complex transitions and transformations, but they do not cover each other as they overlap one another on a straight line. It is simplest of all to ensure this in the cases where the task of the thought does end successfully; when it turns out that the thought did not go into the word, as Dostoevsky says. We once again use the literary examples for clarification, the scene of observation of one of Gleb Uspenky’s character. The scene, where the unhappy pedestrian, not finding words for the expression of a firing thought, owning them, is helplessly tormented and wanders in silence in order for god to provide an understanding, and this leaves his inexpressibly painful sensation. Yet essentially that which this poor dejected mind is experiencing is no different than the torments of the words in the poet or the thinker. Almost with these very words he said, “I would have said to you, my friend…” From time to time darkness is replaced with the fleeting intervals of light; thought is clarified to the unhappy man, and to him, as to the poet, it seems that “ the mystery will accept a familiar face.” He proceeds to explain“ If I, for example, go to the ground, because I am from the ground. If I go to the ground, for example, vice versa, how is it possible for the –” “Ah..ah!” we joyfully uttered.

“Wait, there has to be one word still…Do you see, gentleman, how necessary that is…”

The pedestrian got up and stood in the center of the room, preparing to put another finger aside on his hand, “Here the most present fact is not mentioned at all. And here is how it should be: why, for example…”but here he stopped and lively uttered, who gave you a soul?”

“God.”

“Right. Good. Now, look here…”

We were prepared to glance, but the pedestrian once again stammered, having lost the energy, and, having punched his hips with his hands, almost exclaimed desperately “No! You will do nothing! Not everything is there..Ah, my god! There is only so much I can tell you! Here we must speak from the won! Here about the soul, it is necessary, even just a little! Not even! Not even!”

In this case the aspect that is separating thought from word is clearly visible; it is intransitive for the speaker’s lexicon that separates thinking from speech. If thought were to directly correspond in its structure and period, with the structure and flow of speech, this case, which is described by Uspensky, it were to be impossible. Yet in reality, thought has its own distinct structure and flow, a transition from which, towards the structure and flow of speech, presents great difficulties not only to the very one character mentioned in the earlier scene.

Perhaps the stage artists encountered this problem on the thought that is hiding behind the word, earlier than the psychologists. Often in Stanislavsky’s system we find such an attempt to recreate a subtext of each replica in a drama; that is to uncover the thought and desire that are standing behind each statement. Once again we return to the example.

Chatskiiy says to Sophia “ Blessed is the one who believes, it keeps him warm on earth.” Stanislavsky discloses the subtext of this phrase as the thought “ We will cease this conversation.”

Thus we move to the conclusion that thought does not correspond directly to verbal expression. Thought does not consist of separate words like speech does. If I want to convey the thought that today I saw a boy in a blue blouse who ran along the street on foot, I do not separately see the boy, the blouse and that the blouse is blue, and that he was without shoes, that he runs. I see everything together in one act of thought but I disarticulate this in the speech into separate words. Thought always presents itself as a certain whole, significantly more than a separate word in regard to its extent and volume. The speaker often develops the one and very thought in the course of a few moments. This thought is contained in his mind as a whole; it does not gradually arise with separate units, as its speech develops. That which is simultaneously contained in thought is successively expanded in speech. Thought may be compared to an overhanging cloud that pours a rain of words. Hence, the process of the transition from thought to speech presents itself as an extremely complex process of the dismembering of the thought and its recreation in words. Precisely due to the fact that thought does not only correspond with words, but also with the meanings of the words in which it is expressed, the path from thought to word passes through the meaning. In our speech there is always a guessed thought, a hidden subtext.

Since the direct transition from thought to word is impossible, it always demands the paving of a complex path, arise the complaints on the imperfection of a word and the lamentation concerning the inexpressibility of thought arises. […] For the sake of overcoming of these complaints araises the attempt to fuse words, creating new paths from thought to word through the new meaning of words. Khlebnikov compared this work with the paving of a path from one valley into another; he talked about the direct path from Moscow to Kiev, not through New York, and he called himself a traveler of language. […]

In the end, it is left for us to make the final, concluding step in our analysis of the inner planes of verbal thinking. Thought is still not the final instance in all of this process.

Thought itself is not born from another thought, but from the motivational sphere of our consciousness, which encompasses our vision and demands, our interest and intentions, our affections and emotions. Behind a thought stands the effective and volitional tendency. It is the only one that may provide the answer to the last “why” in the analysis of thinking. If earlier we compared thought to an overhanging cloud that is pouring a rain of words, than we may compare the motivation of thought to the wind that leads towards the movement of the cloud. A real and true understanding of an unfamiliar thought becomes possible only when we uncover its real effectively volitional background. This disclosure of motives leading to the emergence of thought and directing it with the flow, may be illustrated through the example that has already been used by us, regarding disclosure of the subtext at the stage of the interpretation of some sort of role.

Behind each excerpt of the drama’s character stands a desire, as Stanislavsky teaches, that is directed toward the realization of a definite volitional task. That which needs to be recreated in this current situation through the method of a specific interpretation is the initial moment in any act of verbal thinking in living speech. Behind each statement stands the volitional task. Hence, parallel to the text of the play, Stanislavsky noted that the desire lies beneath the character’s thought and speech in each line of the play. We bring into example the text and subtext for several excerpts from the role of Chatsky in the interpretation of Stanislavsky.

(Parallel to the foreshadowed desires)

Text of the drama- replicas Sophia: Ah, Chatsky, I am so glad to see you. (Wants to hide confusion)

Chatsky: You are glad, in a lucky day. However, who can sincerely rejoice that way? It seems to be, at least, people and horses are shivering, I only pleased my self. (Wants to appeal to her conscience through mockery. How could you not be ashamed!)

Liza: Now, sir, if only you were behind the doors, by heaven, not five minutes ago, you would have remembered that we spoke of you! Madame, say it yourself! (Wants to trigger openness)

Sophia: Always, not only now. You cannot reproach me so. (Wants to calm; Wants to help Sophia in the hard sentence)

Chatsky: You put it that way. Blesssed is the one who believes, it keeps him warm on earth.” (Wants to calm Chatsky. I am not guilty of anything! Cease this conversation! And so forth.)

Upon the understanding of an unfamiliar speech, the understanding of certain words turns out to be insufficient, but not the thought of the interlocutors. However, the understanding of the interlocutors thought without the understanding of his motive (of that which is expressed by his thought) is an incomplete understanding. It is precisely the same in the psychological analysis of any given utterance. Only in the end we find out when we reveal this final and most secretive internal plane of verbal thinking: its motivation. Our analysis ends on this. We attempt to briefly look at the results towards which we were lead. Verbal thinking was presented to us as a complex dynamic whole, in which the relationship between thought and word was discovered to be the movement through a whole series of inner planes, as a transition from one plane to another. We carried our analysis from the inner most plane towards the outer most plane. In the live drama of verbal thinking the movement occurs in a reversed direction: from the motive furthering some kind of thought to the formation of the thought itself, to its mediating words in inner speech, followed by the meanings of outer speech, and lastly to the words. However, it would be incorrect for it to present itself as this only path from thought to word is always performed in practice. On the contrary, a wide variety of movements are possible, and they are barely countable with the present condition of our knowledge this process, the direct and reversed movement, and the direct and reversed transition from one plane to the other. However we already know now, in the most basic form, that the movement that breaks off an any given point of this complex path is possible in both directions: from the motive through thought to inner speech; from inner speech to thought; from inner speech to outer speech and so forth. In our task the study of all of these diverse, really ongoing movement on the foundation of the path from thought to word, was not included. We were interested in only one matter, the basic and main: the disclosure of the relationship between thought and word as a dynamic process, as the path from thought to word, as the confirmation and absorption of thought in word. […]

The theories that have attempted to solve this question have remained polarized around two opposing positions. One pole forms a clearly behavioristic understanding of thinking and speech, having found its own expression in the formula: thought is speech minus sound. Another pole presents the edgy idealistic study that is developed with the representations of Bergson and Wurzburg School regarding the full independence of thought from word, regarding the misstatement that brings word into thought. “ Uttered thought is a lie”- this poem of Tiutchev may serve the formula that expresses the very core of this study. […]

We observed that the relationship of thought to word is the living process of the birth of thought in word. Word devoided of thought is foremost a dead word. As the poet says “And as the bees in the hive are deserted, the dead words foully smell.” However the thought, not absorbing in the word, remains a Stygian shadow, in the “mist, ring, and glow,” as another poet says. Hegel considered the word as a being that is vitalized by thought. This being is absolutely necessary for our thoughts. The connection of thought to word is not a primal connection that is given once and for all. It arises in the development and it itself develops. “In the beginning there was word.” Goethe responded to these evangelical words with the words of Faust “In the beginning there was the matter,” wishing so to devalue the word. However, Gutsman notes with Goethe that if to evaluate a word like this one, which is a sounding word, is too high–and to translate a biblical passage “ In the beginning there was the deed” with him, then it is even so possible to read it with another accent, if we briefly look at it from the perspective of the history of development: “In the beginning there was the matter.” Gutsman would like to say that the word presents itself as a higher level of human development in comparison to the highest expression of action. Ultimately he is right. The word was not in the beginning. In the beginning there was the deed. The word forms the end, rather than the beginning of the development. The word is the end, which crowns the deed. In the inclusion of our research we must stop and say a few words on these perspectives that are revealed behind its threshold. Our research has brought us to the threshold of a problem that is broader, even more profound, and even more grand of a problem than the problem of thinking: the problem of consciousness. As mentioned before, our research always had in mind this side of the word, which remains a ground unknown to experimental psychology as the other side of the moon. We attempted to experimentally study the dialectic transition from the perspective aspect to the thinking aspect. We also attempted to demonstrate that the reality is reflected differently in thinking than it is in sensation, that the basic distinctive feature of the word appears to be the generalized reflection of its reality. So, we thereby touched on this aspect in the nature of the word, which significance exceeds the limits of thinking as such, and which, in its fullness, may be studied only in the context of a more general problem: a word and consciousness. If the drying and conceiving consciousness offers different methods of the reflecting reality, then they present themselves as the different types of consciousness. Hence, thinking and speech turn out to be the key towards the understanding of the nature of human consciousness. […] The actual research at each step demonstrates that a word plays a central role in the consciousness as a whole, but not in its separate functions. In Feurbach’s expression, the word, in consciousness, is that which is absolutely impossible for one person, but possible for two. It is the direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness.

Consciousness displays itself in a word, as the sun does in small drops of water. The word is related to consciousness as the small word is to the bigger word, as the living cell is to the organism, as the atom is to the cosmos. It is the small word of consciousness. The meaningful word is the microorganism of human consciousness.

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