Welcome toThe Slips Pagesat Bowling Green State University, There are, to be sure, some persons whose attention is abnormally fixed upon the words rather than upon the topic under discussion, and they sometimes make a nuisance of themselves by pointing out the error and getting it laughed at or recorded before the business at hand is allowed to proceed. One should be kind to these people: they are either fools or linguists. (Sturtevant 1947)
What is a Slip of the Tongue?Technically, a speech error (or slip) is an unintentional movement, addition, deletion, blending or substitution of material within an utterance or between utterances. (Fromkin 1973, 1980; Stemberger 1983). This means that the speaker says something s/he didn't mean to say. Crucially, the utterance is the result of unintentional processes. A slip is not bad grammar, colorful speech, interference from another language or intentional silliness. None of these count as slips:
Slips can involve almost anything: single segments (that is, consonants and/or vowels), parts of words, words, phrases or whole sentences. Let's look at these one at a time. Phonological Slips: Problems with soundsIt's possible to make a mistake when speaking that simply involves a single sound. In fact, up to sixty percent fit this description. Look at these examples:
These poor, frustrated folk all had trouble organizing their consonants in the right places. In the first slip above, {p} in the second syllable of "campaign" came forward and replaced the initial consonant. This is called an anticipation because, presumably, it is a result of looking forward in the utterance and getting material before you need it. Anticipations, by the way, are the most common kind of phonological slip. Listen to the people around you for a day or two and you'll almost certainly hear a phonological anticipation or two. In the second error, the {f} sound in phone replaces the {p} sound in the following word "plan". We say that this {f} sound (which occurred earlier in the utterance) perseverated. This means, it hung around longer than it should have and got reused. The technical term is 'phonological perseveration'. The third slip above is the most dramatic. Here, the flustered speaker swapped two sounds creating what is commonly called a "spoonerism". The first sounds of "shake" and "finger" are exchanged. Technically, this is known as a kind of metathesis. (Note that the first sound of 'shake' is written with two letters, but it is a single sound just like the 'ph' above in 'phone'). These kinds of mistakes give us information about how we assemble the sounds that compose words. Imagine that you have a sort of typewriter in your head. Each key of this typewriter has on it one of the sounds in your language. There is a key for the first sound in 'f-inger' and the first sound in 'sh-ake' and the first sound in 's-pouse'. There is also a key for each different vowel sound. There is a key for the vowel sound in 'crook', one for 'croak' and one for 'crock'. When you want to speak a certain word, you have to hit these keys in the right order. To make this easier, keys that you are planning to hit light up. they also stay lit for a while after you hit them. That 'lighting up' called 'activation' makes it likely that any key you hit by accident will be one that is already part of your speaking plan. You might accidentally hit a lit-up key too early (an anticipation) or reuse a key you didn't mean to reuse (perseveration) or you might switch the order of two keys (a metathesis). It's quite rare to make a mistake that involves a sound that is not part of your plan. Morphological Slips: Problems with Meaningful Parts of WordsWords in English are often made up of more than one meaningful part. Simple examples are words like 'fireplace' and 'doorknob'. You can easily see that there are two parts of both of these words and that each has a meaning. The same is true of a word like 'cats'. One part of the word means 'that adorable feline' and the other part means 'plural'. We say that all of these words 'fireplace' 'doorknob' and 'cats' have two morphemes. When you talk, you can substitute one morpheme for another, leave out or add a morpheme, or simply misplace a morpheme. Here are some examples of morphemic speech errors.
It's sort of hard to know what exactly the target was in the first error. It was probably 'loose screws' or 'screws loose'. In either case, you can see that the 's' that belongs on 'screw-s' got moved onto 'loose'. Lexical Slips: Problems with Whole WordsLexical slips occur when you get the wrong word. They come in two sorts: semantically mediated and phonologically mediated. We'll discuss them one at a time. Semantically Mediated Lexical SlipsOur mothers are a good source of this kind of lexical error. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, you occasionally heard your mother yell things like this as her speech production mechanism struggled to come up with the rightname for the right child:
Of course, there's also that terrible moment when you realize that you have just addressed a new boy/girlfriend by the name of his/her predecessor. These are ordinary examples of lexical slips of the tongue. With apologies to Dr. Freud, they don't necessarily mean anything about the inner workings of the subconscious mind. Proper names are only one source of semantically mediated lexical errors. Words that are related in meaning, or words that are opposites, frequently get mixed up with one another or are blended together. Here's a very nice word blend, given to us by none other than President Bush. He was probably trying to say 'misunderstood' and underestimated' at the same time.
Phonologically Mediated Lexical SlipsPhonologically mediated slips occur when the two words, target and utterance, sound alike but are not necessarily related in meaning. Here's the classic example.
Syntactic Slips: Problems with Whole SentencesThere are a number of ways things can go wrong with entire sentences. We don't mean sentence fragments, or other kinds of casual speech. We're talking about unintended utterances. These are not counted as syntactic slips:
Perhaps the easiest kind of syntactic slip to diagnose is a sentence combination error. In these errors, the speaker has two different ways of saying the same thing ready at the same time. Somehow, no decision is made to suppress one and go ahead with the other. The result is a combination of both sentences. Here's an example.
Slend us your Lips!Now that you know about errors in speech, join us! Become part of the research into errors in speech by submitting an error you have heard or one you have made yourself to our on-line database of slips of the tongue. We promise to set up a fancier interface in the future, but for now, please remember to include the following information when you submit:
swellsj@bgnet.bgsu.edu
About the person who runs this site ... and personally makes plenty of these slips!
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Page Updated: July 2, 2002