Watch out, Wonder Woman! Imperatives and vocatives in interior monologue

This paper pulls together four strands of Regine’s research: vocatives, imperatives, self-addressed questions, and Free Indirect Discourse (FID). Though hardly occurring in FID, vocatives and imperatives in fact abound in Interior Monologue (IM), and the question is what that might mean. We evidently think things that can aptly be reported with sentences such as “Watch out, Wonder Woman!”, most of the time ‘addressing’ ourselves – and in so doing, we seem to be trying to induce ourselves to feel and act in certain ways. This could imply that we have two selves, an alter beside the ego, but just as likely, or more, it means that we engage in thought acts that help us form decisions, in part through deliberation, in part through intuition.