ABSTRACT
This chapter show a few ways in which examining ordinary talk can shed light on people's thought processes. Any sample of actual speech can provide a rich mine of information on mental functioning. Language is used in a variety of ways, each of which affects the shape that language takes. The only way to confirm provisional understandings is to confront them with further data, with data from larger samples of ordinary talk, but supplemented ultimately with experimental and observational data of other kinds. A focus of consciousness is very limited in the amount of information it can contain, language provides good evidence of this limited capacity of active consciousness, the same phenomenon that psychologists have discussed in terms of short-term memory. Language shows that each focus is replaced by another at approximately one to two second intervals. Silent thought or daydreaming, lacking the constraints of overt language production, follows a similar time course.
