Abstract
In reminiscence at least, Sartre displays a clear awareness of others’ imitations of his utterances and of his own production “recipe” that includes whole borrowed sentences. Moreover, Sartre seems to reach back and in autobiographical reconstruction show deferred imitation and reworking of particular verbal productions from his childhood language-learning days. So, Sartre has done us the favor of introducing this book on young children who are learning language and their conversational partners. Its concerns are who imitates whom, when, with what awareness, with what purpose, and with what impact.
I make childish remarks, they are remembered, they are repeated to me. I learn to make others. I make grown-up remarks. I know how to say thins “beyond my years” without meaning to. These remarks are poems. The recipe is simple: you must trust to the Devil, to chance, to emptiness, you borrow whole sentences from grown-ups, you string them together and repeat them without understanding them. In short, I pronounce true oracles, and each adult interprets them as he wishes.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1964
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Speidel, G.E., Nelson, K.E. (1989). A Fresh Look at Imitation in Language Learning. In: Speidel, G.E., Nelson, K.E. (eds) The Many Faces of Imitation in Language Learning. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 24. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1011-5_1
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