Mnemonic utterance and its identification

The focus of the current research is individual memory operating both with a person's past and present experiences and linguistic manifestation of its work, that is, the verbal result of the said mnemonic function. In accordance with observations conducted as part of this research, a person's cognitive activities in the mnemonic situation result in an utterance representing specific mnemonic processes involved in the current mnemonic situation. Utterances of this kind will be further referred to as mnemonic utterances, the term meaning an utterance, both oral and written, produced by the subject of a mnemonic situation and representing one or more mnemonic processes. The methodology used in the research work to identify mnemonic utterances and demarcate them from other units within the text set under analysis is based on three criteria: communicative, semantic and formal. The research results show that the verbal outcome of a person's cognitive activities in the mnemonic situation takes the form of a mnemonic utterance, which is a recurring speech formation represented by three types: a retrospective monologue, a mnemonic dialogue and a retrospective narrative. When processing the data under analysis, mnemonic dialogues were registered in all sorts of mnemonic situations while the usage scope of the retrospective monologue and retrospective narrative was limited to mnemonic situations of storing information in memory and reproducing information from memory. The retrospective monologue and the mnemonic dialogue are used in person-to-person communication with passive and active feedback respectively, while the retrospective narrative does not presuppose any personal interaction between the sender of the message and the addressee. Unlike the mnemonic dialogue, which serves as a verbal manifestation of memory operations processing both the past and present mnemonic experience, the retrospective monologue and retrospective narrative are thematically related to fragments of past held in memory and reconstructed verbally. Common formal markers of the mnemonic utterance are found both on the lexical level and the level of grammar. They include verbs denoting mnemonic processes, nouns and adjectives of retrospective semantics, temporal adverbials and a range of appropriate tense forms.

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