The Dialogical Self’s Round Table: Who Sits At It and Where?

Abstract

Abstract We propose a new method to measure distances between different I-positions in internal dialogue. Subjects facing and then making a major life decision via internal dialogue can indicate the places of different voices in the dialogical self’s structure. The subjects’ task is to assign a place to themselves (narrator I) and their imaginary interlocutors at a round table. The Dialogical Self's Round Table (DSRT) task, a modified form of the Semantic Distance Task (SDT; Bartczak & Bokus, 2013, 2017), was designed so that the distances between the different I-positions could be coded numerically. Presenting the method of the DSRT, we will answer the question of which voices are activated the most often in internal dialogues, and which voices can be heard the most often from different locations at the round table. We will also analyze where the subjects place the voices they consider to be the most important.