Individuation of idiomatic sense in inner speech: integrating the Egger–Vygotsky hypothesis with embodied semantics and the default mode network

Investigating the semantic specificity of inner speech means addressing one of the most elusive and underexplored sides of language studies: the irreducible mark of subjectivity, long marginalised in 19th- and 20th-century comparative and structuralist approaches as a non-formalisable residue of analysis (Bergounioux. 2010. Les trois sources de la théorie de l’endophasie: phonologie, psychologie et clinique. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 32(2). 9–22; De Palo. 2022. Le langage intérieur, le sujet et le paradoxes de la dimension métalinguistique. In S. Smadja & F. Dubor (eds.), Pratiques monologales , 39–61). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study integrates the Egger–Vygotsky hypothesis on the idiomatic and existential value of inner personal sense – distinguished here from more stable and socially shared meaning – with recent perspectives offered by embodied semantics and the Default Mode Network theory. Inner speech is interpreted here as an intrapsychic site of continuous individuation of sense: socially acquired meanings are not simply stored, but are resemanticised and reshaped through the subject’s experiential and autobiographical imprint. The first half of the paper revisits key analogies between the philosophical and psycholinguistic analyses of Egger (1881. La parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive . Paris: Germer-Baillière) and Vygotsky ([1934] 1986. Thought and language , edited and translated by Alex Kozulin, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), proposing a model of “ inner idiolect ”, marked by semantic condensation and creativity, where sense [ sens / smysl’ ] emerges as the fundamental unit of analysis: a semantic microcosm refracting consciousness, whose idiomatic density might be almost untranslatable into external speech. Reframed in cognitive and neuroscientific terms, this meaning/sense dialectic may be interpreted in relation to the neural overlaps between multimodal semantic hubs and DMN areas (Binder et al. 2009. Where is the semantic system? A critical review and meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex 19(12). 2767–2796), suggesting a process of multimodal semantic integration as a plausible functional background for sense-making operations carried out by the brain in resting-state conditions and mediated by spontaneous states of inner speech.