ABSTRACT
There is something very natural about talking. Readers could be forgiven for protesting that after reading so much recorded speech there is little need for more discussion of it now. But was that natural talking? People talk naturally to each other in a reciprocal style with first one engaging the other and then the other answering back. Of course there is also talking to oneself, giving a lecture, and answering the interviewer’s questions, but none of those quite resembles ‘natural talk’. Indeed, the old belief that you must be mad to talk to yourself, the pejorative use of terms like ‘Stop lecturing me!’, the embarrassment of being asked a sequence of questions which is unaffected by whatever answer we give, the use of solitary confinement as one of the severest forms of punishment and the very serious risk of mania that it entails, all suggest that natural reciprocal talk must be fulfilling one or more extremely important psychological functions.
