Verbalizing animal inner speech

Abstract

This paper investigates narrative sequences where human speakers verbalize non-human animals’ imagined thoughts in Finnish. The data contain interviews reporting interspecies encounters in the early 20th-century peasant communities, and conversations from a call-in radio program broadcasted in 2012 where participants describe and explain animal behavior. The study focusses on the grammatical and narrative properties of animal inner speech (AIS). These are analyzed in a cognitive-pragmatic framework concerning reported thoughts, deixis, and intersubjective meaning construal. The results are compared to what we know of language use in Human–Animal interaction. To gain further insight into the role of human language in describing interspecies encounters, the outcome of the analysis is discussed with respect to the biosemiotic notion of perceptual worlds.Reported AIS was found to co-occur with expressions of animal sensory perception, describing the ways in which animals treat and assess sensory input. In doing so, reported AIS differs from what previous literature has observed concerning reported human thoughts. From a narrative perspective, reported AIS reiterated already provided information and did not contribute to the unfolding of events. AIS was used to share awareness of human experience concerning the plurality of perceptual and semiotic centers in the situation described. As such, it displays certain similarities with language use in situations with co-present animals. The paper sheds light on the linguistic coding of interspecies sharedness in perception and spatial coordination.