In:Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”
Edited by Yoko Fujii, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno
[Culture and Language Use 24] 2025
► pp. 97–118
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The process of speech emergence in dialogue
Perspectives from Eastern philosophy
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 2 December 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.24.04kaw
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.24.04kaw
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate, based on the background of Eastern philosophy, the
primary ba, which is assumed to be the field of deep consciousness where people’s feelings and
thoughts are latent as memories, and the process of speech generation that emerges from the primary
ba. The paper also discusses the relationship between the primary ba, speech,
and communication by focusing on what is happening in the depths of the mind of each interlocutor in a dialogue, and
establishing that the various feelings and thoughts that are stirring beneath the surface of superficial linguistic
expressions are shared in the same deep field of the dialogue.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Primary ba
- 2.1Ba theory
- 2.2Theories that ground primary ba in Eastern philosophy
- 2.3Buddhism at the root of the conception of the primary ba: The philosophy of Yogācāra
- 3.Toshihiko Izutsu’s “synchronic structuring” model
as the basis of “primary ba”- 3.1Overview of deep/surface structure (primary/secondary ba)
- 3.1.1From the deep to the surface / from the unsegmented to the segmented (from primary ba to secondary ba)
- 3.1.2The domain of depth and unsegmentedness (primary ba)
- 3.1.3From surface to depth / From segmented to unsegmented (from secondary ba to primary ba)
- 3.2“Ba” and Toshihiko Izutsu’s “synchronic structuring” model
- 3.1Overview of deep/surface structure (primary/secondary ba)
- 4.Mechanisms of meaning and speech generation
in communication in “ba” - 5.Conclusion
- 5.1WORD arises from the deep level of the mind, the primary ba
- 5.2Words are manifestations from all the accumulations
of the deep layers of the mind
Notes References
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