Notes on: Vygotsky (Ch.6- 1986, pp.181-183): relations between ‘writing’ and ‘speech’:

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‒            Consider here also the historical effect of the invention of writing and print (and the learning of writing) upon one’s understanding of speech. It clearly produces (see Vygotsky, 1986, pp.180-183) a radical and irreversible difference in what a language ‘is’ for those who belong to a literate society, in which writing is a major form of communication - to such an extent that it is quite impossible for us, as members of a literate culture, to imagine quite what speech is for members of an oral culture.

‒            Indeed, if faced with the task of saying what a thought is like before we have expressed it, what is the image that you come up with? A ‘sentence with the sound stripped off?

Vygotsky draws out six differences between writing and speech (oral and inner speech):

‒            1) Writing is a separate linguistic function, in both structure and mode of functioning. “It is speech in thought and image only, lacking the musical, expressive, intonational qualities of oral speech. In learning to write, the child must disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images of words (p.181) - it is it’s abstract quality that is the main stumbling block to its use.

‒            2) "Writing is also speech without an actual interlocutor" (p.181). It has to be addressed to an absent, imaginary person. Thus writing requires a double abstraction: from both the sound and rhythm, and from the possibility of reply.

‒            3) "The child has little motivation to learn writing when we begin to teach it" (p.181). Because they experience no need for it. In conversation, every utterance is prompted by a motive (cf. Bahktin, on the ‘responsive’ nature of language), by the need for a reply to what has gone before: an answer to a question; an explanation for puzzlement; etc. The motives for writing (sentences) are more abstract.

‒            4) "Writing also requires deliberate analytical action on the part of the child" (p.182). They put words and sentences together, they must take notice of both the sound structure of words (to get the spelling right) and of word sequences (to get the syntax of their sentences right). Writing stands in a different relation to inner speech than oral speech: written speech follows inner speech and presupposes its existence; while oral speech does not.

‒            5) However, written and inner speech have very different forms - hence the task of putting one’s thought into words: While "inner speech is condensed and abbreviated speech" (p.182); predicative, i.e., about the subject of thought without the subject being explicitly present, because always known to the thinker. Written speech must explain the situation fully, in order to be intelligible. It must within itself construct a fully intelligible ‘intralinguistic reality’.

‒            6) "Written speech is considerably more conscious, and it is produced more deliberately that oral speech" (p.182).

“We may conclude that (a) the essential difference between written and oral speech reflects the difference between two types of activity, one of which is spontaneous, involuntary, and nonconscious, while the other is abstract, voluntary, and conscious; (b) the psychological functions on which written speech is based have not even begun to develop in the proper sense when instruction in writing starts. It must build on barely emerging, immature processes” (183).

In other words, writing transforms speech utterly, in a way which seemingly ‘disconnects’ it from its origins. In writing, “we are obliged to create the situation, to represent it to ourselves. This demands detachment from the actual situation” (Vygotsky, 1962, p.99). This is our ability too in literate speech. The point is: no amount of investigation in biological or naturalistic terms will uncover the nature of our current linguistic abilities to talk in such a detached manner; only a historical analysis is adequate. But the point is also, that such discontinuities are only apparent; the disconnections are functional; at each stage, what is transformed is the imaginary intralinguistic context (Whorf, 1956) in terms of which we represent ourselves to ourselves.