Surely, spontaneous speech errors don't count against fundamental proficiency. I must wonder about this mythical creature who's never experienced a tip of the slung. :)
a slip of the tongue and nothing more; hey I have still been known to say hopsital and as for hippo....hoppo....hoppopitamus....hippopotamus...it's too early in the morning!
I have a terrible habit of trying to get out an eight or nine word sentence in the speed it ought to take me to speak only three. This often results in the garbled speech you can imagine. Mine is not linguistically related, mine is a habit of being ignored for so long in social situations that I imagine I must make my point in a very small amount of time because you won't waste the amount of time it ought to take me to say what I need to say. I really ought to get over that.
It depends who you ask. I think some people in syntax and processing would say there was a mistake in the "merging" of the past tense ending to the wrong head (onto the subject rather than the verb). Meaning there was a processing error in your grammar as you were building up the sentence.
Some others may call it a phonological metathesis, or a motor programming error as you were pronouncing the sentence.
I think calling it a "slip" though covers all these possibilities.
I've heard this sort of thing called "anticipatory speech error" where you pronounce something coming up in the sentence (namely, the final [d]) earlier than you should. I'd argue, however, that it's not a metathesis, as you're not changing the order of any sounds. You're simply adding a sound that doesn't belong.
Granted, metathesis is typically exemplified by "hopsital" for "hospital", "gaspetti" for "spaghetti", "axe" for "ask", or even "Mardon me, padam, but this pie is occupewed. May I sew you to another sheet?" But surely a case can be made for the transposition of a terminal consonant with null, particularly when both "shaped" and "looked" are valid lexical constructions?
Hmmm. I see the point. (Actually, I think I misread the original error as "the shaped looked odd.") I would still argue, however, that this isn't (classic) metathesis, as what's being transposed is not really phonemes, but morphemes. The past-tense [t] from the verb is being misplaced on the noun.
Although in this particular case it is true that a single phoneme has been moved around, I think it's more interesting that this phoneme also corresponds to a complete morpheme. This ability to misplace single morphemes has been the source of theories of speech production that say that we choose word roots at one stage of production, and then add appropriate inflectional morphology at a different stage, and finally phonologically encode them. (Phonological encoding is the stage at which we decide that the same past tense morpheme can be pronounced as [d] on a verb like fill but as [t] on a verb like look). In the OP's case, lexical selection was fine; it was the inflectional process that went bonkers. Since metathesis is traditionally a
( ... )
Comments 11
Clearly, not qualified to be using my own language, let alone teach it. *facepalm*
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Some others may call it a phonological metathesis, or a motor programming error as you were pronouncing the sentence.
I think calling it a "slip" though covers all these possibilities.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Although in this particular case it is true that a single phoneme has been moved around, I think it's more interesting that this phoneme also corresponds to a complete morpheme. This ability to misplace single morphemes has been the source of theories of speech production that say that we choose word roots at one stage of production, and then add appropriate inflectional morphology at a different stage, and finally phonologically encode them. (Phonological encoding is the stage at which we decide that the same past tense morpheme can be pronounced as [d] on a verb like fill but as [t] on a verb like look). In the OP's case, lexical selection was fine; it was the inflectional process that went bonkers. Since metathesis is traditionally a ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment