Assist. Lect. Rasha Ali

Department of English

College of Education for the Humanities

University of Kerbala

 Slips of the Tongue

Definition

Slips of the tongue are considered a type of speech errors that deviate the normal sequence of segments in intended utterances. They occur in everyday communications causing comic effects. They reflect the complicated mental processing which is happening unintentionally. Speakers do not notice their errors till they hear themselves uttering the wrong sound or sounds, and in some cases they do not notice them at all.

Freud’s Perspective

From psychological point of view, Sigmund Freud proposes that slips of the tongue can reveal unconscious thoughts, needs or wishes. However, most linguists see them as a result of unintentional accidents through cognitive processing rather than psychological reflections.

Types:

1-In shifts, one speech segment disappears from its right position and occurs somewhere else. For example, “That’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it (decides to hit it)”.

2-Exchanges happen when two linguistic items replace each other. For example, “Fancy getting your model renosed (getting your nose remodeled)”.

3-Anticipations occur when a later item takes the position of an earlier one. They differ from shifts in that the segment is repeated, in the first time occurs in the wrong place and in the second time in the right place. For example, “Bake my bike (take my bike)”.

4-Perseverations are opposite to anticipations as they occur when an earlier item replaces a later one. For example, “He pulled a pantrum (tantrum)”.

 5-Additions appear when speakers add linguistic unit. For example, “I didn’t explain this clarefully enough (carefully enough)”.

6-Deletions which mean to leave items out. For example, “I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly (unintelligibly)”.

7-Substitutions occur when one segment is replaced by an intruder. These differ from previously described slips in that the source of the intrusion may not be in the sentence. For example, “At low speeds it’s too light (heavy)”.

8-Blends seemingly happen when more than one word is used and the two proposed items ‘‘fuse’’ or ‘‘blend’’ into a single item. For example, “That child is looking to be spaddled (spanked/paddled)”. 

Conclusion

Linguistically, a slip of the tongue refers to an unintentional deviation from intended speech. These errors occur when speakers accidentally say something different from what they planned to articulate, often revealing underlying cognitive processes involved in language production. Slips of the tongue are a natural and frequent occurrence in spoken language, shedding light on the complexity of human language production.