Semantic peculiarities of inner speech1. Superiority of the sense of a word over its meaning: the sense of a word is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, complex whole, which has several zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, but the most stable & precise one. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts it changes its sense. As for meaning, it remains stable throughout the change of sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no more that a stone in the edifice of sense, a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech. A word in context means both more & less than the same word in isolation: more, because it acquires new content; less: because its meaning is limited & narrowed by the context. The sense of a word is a complex, mobile phenomenon; it changes in different minds & situations & is almost unlimited. The word derives its sense from the sentence. The sentence gets its sense from the paragraph, the paragraph – from the text, the text – from the book, the book – from all the works of the author. Words in a sentence are relatively independent from each other. The predominance of sense over meaning, of sentence of a word, of context over sentence is the rule. 2. Word combination is a kind of agglutination. As egocentric speech of the child approaches inner speech the child uses agglutination more as a way of forming compound words to express complex ideas. 3. The way in which senses of words combine & unite: the senses of different words flow into one another – literally “influence” one another – so that the earlier ones modify the later ones. The title of a literary work expresses its content to a much greater degree than the name of a work of art or the title of a music track. The words appear throughout the book, but, through the ultimate relationship these words acquire simpli-significance.
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