What’s my name in absolute solitude?: The essence of monologic selves in Japanese

This study explores Japanese solitude speech as it refers to the speaker himself or herself. The chief aim is to shed new light on the nature of the speaker’s self-referential expressions in two types of solitude speech: self-encouragement and self-blame. The solitude speaker would be expected to be predominantly realized by the reflexive pronoun zibun, which is by nature independent of an addressee. However, our questionnaire survey found that the pronoun zibun is far outnumbered by other first-person pronouns, which are assumed to presuppose an addressee. We argue that Japanese speakers assume ‘plain’ or ‘bare’ selves as what they perceive themselves to truly be, with no regard to any context or interaction with an addressee.