Functioning of Autobiographical Memory as a Discursive Phenomenon

Abstract

The article investigates the discursive manifestation of autobiographical memory, enabling to understand the social and communicative nature of this phenomenon. Autobiographical practices represent the social and cultural materialized form of the fixation of autobiographical memory determined by speech norms and memory mechanisms; autobiographical practices are inter-active and inter-subjective, mediate the formation and functioning of this subsystem of memory, reorganizing the preverbal event of the individual past through the concepts fixed by language. The article examines the development of autobiographical memory forms in early ontogeny, the relationship of these processes with the formation of speech and discursive competences. It studies the patterns of discursive actualization of the formed autobiographical memory and demonstration of its functional and structural characteristics. It is shown that the formed autobiographical memory as a personality-cognitive system organizes and arranges the fragments of the individual past; it is involved in the formation of self-identity, has a layered structure that is related to heterogeneous forms of processing autobiographical material and organizational forms of individual experience and performs different functions, all of which determines the patterns of respective discursive practices. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5p122