2. How do we know that the man is thinking, not talking? After all, he appears to be addressing the young woman directly.

The pattern of direct address in the poem (cf. the use of the second person pronoun 'you' in particular) would normally be seen in spoken conversation. But the fact that the addresser appears to be rather rude towards the addressee (and she does not respond to this rudeness, apparently) suggests that he must be 'addressing' her mentally, not verbally. Otherwise, you would expect her to get angry and leave. After all, he predicts that she will run home the next morning, and paints a cruel, even ludicrous picture of that return home (running with broken shoes?). Effectively, we are bringing along another schematic assumption about verbal behaviour in coming to the conclusion that the 'address' is not verbal, namely that, other things being equal, we expect to be polite to one another, because impoliteness is socially divisive. If we 'add together' the direct address phenomena in the poem and the idea that the addresser is thinking, not speaking, it appears that he is 'addressing' her mentally - i.e. he is thinking about her in a conscious, deliberate way as he listens to her whispering ('talking on tiptoe) to him.

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