Slips of tongue

1. SLIPS OF TONGUE

2. INTRODUCTION Sigmund Freud started it as a therapy in which he let the patients/subjects to speak, and discovered that the root cause of their psychological disorders. Psychoanalytical criticism studies the unintentional utterance of tongue as productions/representations of repressed desires.

3. Case of Elizabeth von R in Studies in Hysteria Her envy for her sister for having an ideal marital life which let her to ‘slip of tongue’ “Good now I can marry him” the Unconscious is a storehouse for memories, thoughts, motives  and desires that are too painful or anxiety-provoking for a person to think about consciously.

4. In a psychoanalytic sense Slips of tongue are the symbols which have much deeper personal significance. But on the other hand he stated himself that not all the slips of tongue were all significant symbols of repression there can be other reasons too.

5. In Psycholinguistics Slips of Tongue are generally considered as Speech errors. Slips of the tongue have been the object of PSYCHOLINGUISTICS research since 1960s. One of the most imprortant contributors is V ICTORIA FROMKIN . She contended that we switch initials consonants of words with a single clause.

6. SLIPS OF TONGUE AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS In Psycholinguistics tongue slips are one kind of speech errors which are regarded mostly as errors of articulation. Serendre Shutter in 2004 stated that: It is a complicated mental processing which is happening entirely below the level of consciousness, so we're not aware of doing anything except when we hear ourselves saying something funny, and its all happening at such lighting speed that we're not aware of any time these steps are taking.

7. William A. Spooner (1844-1930), a famous lecturer at Oxford University to whom many slips of the tongue have been attributed. For this reason, slips of the tongue are sometimes called Spoonerisms . SPOONERISMS: is the transposition of initial consonants in a pair of words. Examples: (1) Intended : You have wasted the whole term Said : You have tasted the whole worm (2) Intended : The dear old Queen Said : The queer old dean

8. This suggests that there is pre-planning of an utterance: speakers have a „mental image” of an utterance before they even start producing it. Victoria Fromkin Said that: “ Slips of the tongue are often the result of a sound being carried over from one word to the next ” Although the slips are mostly treated as errors of articulation, it has been suggested that they may result from ‘slips of the brain’ as it tries to organize linguistic messages.

9. TYPES OF SLIPS OF TONGUE Tongue slips can be classified into two categories : the major category and the secondary category. Smith (2003:1) identifies three levels of tongue slips, they are as follows:

10. FURTHER ELABORATION However, these three levels can be taken various forms that can be summarized as follows: SPOONERISMS: They involve the interchanging of initial consonants of two words . MALAPORINISM: Are caused by the confusion of two similar sounds

11. ANTICIPATION: This kind of error occurs as the initial consonant of the first word is replaced by the initial consonant of the latter word. PERSERVATION: This kind of error occurs when the initial consonant of the latter word is replaced by the initial consonant of the first word. BLEND: This error of tongue slips refers to a fusion of two words into one.

12. VOWEL PLUS ‘R’ It occurs when the vowel in the first word is replaced by the vowel plus 'r' in the latter word . ERRORS WITHIN WORDS: Tongue slips can occur within the words too. DERIVATIONAL AFFIXES: Errors: It is usually the slippers derive the word wrongly.

13. DELETION: This kind of tongue slips occurs when there is a whole consonant is totally lost. CONSONANT SHIFT OR MOVEMENT: This kind of error occurs when the consonant in the first word moves to another word. CONSONANT CLUSTER DIVIDED: Divided :It occurs when two consonant clusters in the first word are replaced by the two consonant clusters of the second word.

14. WORD SUBSTITUTION In this kind of Tongue Slips a whole word is replaced by another word.

15. Yule’s conception of tongue slips Yule believes that when brain and tongue deny to work in accordance slips of tongue occur. Since our whole linguistics knowledge is stored in our mind he calls it the ‘SLIPS OF BRAIN’ He suggests: that our “word-storage” system is organized on the basis of some phonological information and that some words in the store are more easily retrieved than others.

16. Recent research has focused on speech production, most notably how the  brain  translates thoughts into words.   Cognitive  scientist Gary Dell, a professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana, contends that slips of the tongue are indeed revealing—of a person's capacity for using language and its components. In his view, concepts, words, and sounds are interconnected in three networks in the brain—the semantic, lexical, and phonological—and speech arises from their interaction.

17. Imagine that you, like Freud's Miss X, would like to express the word cultivate . Your mind activates your semantic network, which represents the meanings of the 30,000 or so words in your vocabulary   Confusion with a word that one recently thought, heard, read, or said. "Words that come to your mind are likely to intrude into speech," says Dell

18. Sure, the unconscious plays a role in slips of the tongue, says Daniel Wegner. Just not in the way Freud thought. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, famously asked volunteers not to think of a white bear. Then he told them to speak about anything that was on their minds. In the stream of speech that followed, the forbidden white bear reared its unwanted head about once a minute. "Part of our unconscious mind is always thinking about the worst thing," explains Wegner The problem is, the more the conscious mind (prefrontal cortex) wants to suppress a thought, the more the unconscious has to check to make sure we're not thinking it; so we think about it more.

19. Two conditions increase the risk of making a so-called Freudian slip, Wegner says. One is the thought that you'd rather suppress. The other is a stressor, a distraction, time pressure, or a competing mental agenda .