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Psychology and Grammar

The Construction of the Autobiographical Self

Trinity College, Dublin, quigleyj{at}tcd.ie

This is an interdisciplinary discussion bringing grammar to bear on questions of self and identity in children in the linguistic constructionist tradition of theorists like Bamberg, Budwig and Slobin, and in the spirit of theorists like Bruner and Harré who advocate the development and use of grammatical analysis as a research strategy in psychology. Psychology has always been interested in selfhood and the development of a sense of self, most recently those forms of social constructionism and discursive psychology that highlight the importance of discourse and language in the development and daily life of the individual. But if language and language development are to be central scholarly concerns for psychologists, it is important to explore the basic premise that using certain linguistic forms or constructions actually brings out certain types of discourse. This means looking not just at what is accomplished outside the individual by speaking in certain ways, but at how the individual is actually constructed via her or his own language choices, how one's sense of self, of identity, of agency, of moral responsibility, and so on, is constructed: the real-time effects of a speaker's grammatical choices and situated opinions.

Key Words: autobiographical discourse • grammatical analysis • self and identity

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 2, 147-170 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354301112001


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