Reviewed by Dennis Ryan, University Writing and Language Consultants

In this book, Yuko Hasegawa explores soliloquy as ‘a tool for thinking’ (1). Having recorded and analyzed the soliloquies of twenty-four Japanese native speakers and ten English-speaking study participants, the Japanese corpus consisted of 3,042 utterances (350 minutes) and the English one of 18,609 words (150 minutes). Japanese is particularly apt for the author’s inquiry because it is grammatically and lexically marked for interaction. H postulates that if such markers are removed, researchers can break new ground in understanding how humans process thought before using language in social settings.

In Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–39), H uses soliloquy data to demonstrate clear differences in participants’ structural language use in communicative and non-communicative settings. Ch. 2, ‘Sentence-final particles’ (41–71), discusses the use of the Japanese sentence-final particles ne and yo; ne is the equivalent to the English ‘Isn’t it’ while yo marks emphasis. Furthermore, ne is used when speakers match two pieces of information and yo in inference building.

 In Ch. 3, ‘Deixis and anaphora’ (73–103), H parses the data for Japanese demonstratives (e.g. kore, sore, are), equivalent to English this, that, and that over there, discussing their usage in terms of ‘deixis’ and ‘anaphora’. H confirms that ko-so-a are recurrent in soliloquy and that ko and a occur with or without an antecedent, thus leading her to argue that both are deictic. Ch. 4, ‘Gendered speech in soliloquy’ (105–37), describes the ‘differentiated gender speech styles’ of Japanese men and women, providing numerous examples from recorded soliloquies from men’s and women’s speech, which differ morphosyntactically and pragmatically.

 In Ch. 5, ‘Soliloquy and linguistic politeness’ (139–63), H discusses how polite forms are integral to Japanese grammar, with deference and distancing cooccuring when Japanese speakers employ polite speech. Plain speech, on the other hand, conveys intimacy, and the limitations of the two styles cause problems when speakers want to express warm but deferential feelings, which H terms ‘intimate exaltation’ (162–63). Soliloquy can be inserted into discourse to simultaneously index both deference and intimacy without offending the addressee (163).

Ch. 6, ‘The indefinite you in English soliloquy’ (165–93), presents soliloquy data that focus on ‘you in thought/language processing in English. The data show speakers repeatedly using you. H concludes that indefinite you might better be regarded as intrapersonal you in many instances, as the speaker clearly addresses himself; this also happens in Japanese soliloquiess (e.g. Omae wa nanto bakana koto o shitan da. ‘What a stupid thing you [the speaker] did.’).

This book makes a technically sophisticated argument for the use of soliloquy in the study of cognition, and H’s crosslinguistic facility and interdisciplinary range are impressive. H is a profound thinker and expositor on the theoretical level. My only reservation concerns her seeming lack of awareness of the tradition of soliloquy in Western literary texts, which reflect the greater utility of soliloquy in everyday life. Soliloquy in the West is at least as old as its oldest written document, The epic of Gilgamesh, and it shows up repeatedly in Greek and Roman antiquity as apostrophe. Notwithstanding this concern, H has written a thought-provoking book that I highly recommend to linguists researching cognition, pragmatics, and language function.