Communicating a feeling

Abstract

This article examines the design and situated employment of reported `private thoughts' in both everyday and institutional interaction. By reported `private thoughts' we mean the `active voicing' (Wooffitt, 1992) of utterances characterized as `private thought' done in the first place for the speaker-feeler, rather than the listener. Examples are drawn from a large UK collection of over 240 instances from domestic telephone calls, interview talk, therapy sessions, and patient—provider interactions. Instead of treating reported `private thoughts' as neutral and transparent descriptions of the inner mind, we focus on their `brought off ' nature. Drawing on the cumulative resources of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, we focus on lexical and non-lexical features of their design and its similarity to direct reported speech. We go on to illustrate the flexibilities of positioning reporting `private thoughts' affords, that is, how they can be done for the self as a `one-off ', as generalized or hypothetical and how they can be done for others. Our analyses draw attention to how `private thoughts' might be considered as a speaker's resource for handling everyday rational accountability in reporting and explaining actions and events.