| This dissertation examines the role of speaking in the writing process of unsophisticated writers. Viewed from the perspective of Vygotskyan psycholinguistics, speaking is understood here as having more than a communicative function it is seen as serving a critical cognitive function in all human activity. This is most evident when individuals engaged in cognitively difficult tasks externalize their inner speech as private speech in order to guide themselves in the performance of the task. The analysis of linguistic phenomena presented in this dissertation shows that naive writers faced with the difficult task of writing externalize portions of their inner speech in written form, i.e., private writing.The linguistic analysis presented here focuses on three features of students' writing. The first is the manner in which they encode information according to its given/new status. Students' treatment of information as "given" when it has not yet been introduced into the discourse results in writing characterized by a preponderance of predicates (i.e., new information), a defining feature of inner speech. The second area of analysis concerns the manner in which the choice of referring expressions reflects speakers' attention in discourse. This investigation reveals that naive writers encode referents in such a way as to mark shifts in their attention to items throughout the performance of the writing task, not to mark discursive shifts in a text. The third area of analysis is that of modality, specifically modal verbs and past tense as epistemic deictic operators. Students are shown to use modal operators to encode as epistemically remote, not only the propositional content of their writing, but, more importantly, the proposition of writing propositions. In this manner students reveal their hypothetical stance in relation to writing.The work of this dissertation shows that inner speech is externalized as private writing in student compositions. Private writing serves students in seeking and planning ways in which to perform the difficult task of composing a text. |
