Slips of the Tongue - A Classification

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, printed single-sided, grade: 1,3, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), course: Slips of the tongue, language: English, abstract: Whenever people fail to utter the message they wanted to convey correctly, they apologizeand tend to explain their accidental mistake as a slip of the tongue. However, what is meantand covered by this term which is used so often to refer to speech errors? Does its universalitysuggest that all tongue slips are of the same kind? If not, how can they be distinguished?This term paper will try to give a more detailed categorization of speech anomalies, firstproviding a definition what is generally seen as a slip of the tongue. It will be shown, whowere the first linguists to examine this topic and what discoveries were made.In order to give an own precise classification of speech errors, different approaches formain categorizations will be presented and taken into consideration. On the basis of thesemain categories, further sub-categories are elaborated and illustrated with examples given bydifferent authors in order to explain every feature appropriately. Since many authors still notagree upon a common sub-classification, this term paper will select the most suitable termsand definitions, try to compromise about the most common ones and give suggestions forfurther distinctions. To be conforming to the majority of the literature, the most commonterminology shall be used. However, if provided terms are inappropriate or imprecise, theywill be modified.The types of speech errors will be ordered via the main class they belong to. They will bepresented as sub-classes, defined, explained and illustrated by examples in detail. Examplesare marked with ordinals. The incorrect utterance is always presented with an asterisk andfollowed by the proper realization in brackets. The pronunciation of the slips is written ingraphemes, i.e. normally written words, as far as this is possible to convey the mistake. Whereno written equivalent can be found, square brackets will be used for the transcription of thespeech error.After all issues of one main category have been elaborated, rules and general remarkswhich apply to all of them will be stated.Finally, this term paper concludes which problems may occur when classifying slips of thetongue and provide an outlook about what speech errors reveal about the speech productionprocess, the inner human lexicon and language universals. [...]