Slips if IT\'s Not One

Slips

If it's not one thing it's your mother'

Parapraxis and the Sense of Nonsense

Slips of the tongue, lapsus linguae, parapraxes or fehlleistung are many different ways to say, perhaps, the same thing. During the course of our lives we all certainly have made an error or two in speech. By this we mean not saying what we had originally intended, which has often lead to either humorous, quite embarrassing or even disastrous results. It is these linguistics mishaps that will be addressed in this paper and they will generally be referred to by their more scientific appellation, parapraxis. Generally these parapraxes have been researched within two scientific categories, originally the purview of the branch of science known as linguistics, now also the discipline of psychology has gained an eager interest in them. Linguists are mainly concerned with the mechanics behind these slips while psychologist feel that they can often hold an inner meaning when viewed as the inklings of the sub-conscious mind revealing itself. There is also a current school of thought that now views them as merely redundant habits of mind that we are prey to as well as simply just mistakes that often happen in very complex organisms like the brain of a human being

Lapsus Linguea, Latin for slips of the tongue, have been around since most probably before the Latin language itself. Poets and scientists alike have always held a fascination for them. For the artist they can create a feeling of irony or satire, for the scientist they can reveal more about the mystery of human language itself and for the psychologist and exploration of the ID. It is commonly assumed that the discovery, or rather the popularization of speech errors, is attributed to Sigmund Freud. He combined them together with a much wider range of errors that he termed in German, fehlleistung, or faulty actions. These are actions performed by either speech or deed.

It is not known exactly how he term 'Freudian Slip' came into its current usage, but it is generally attributed to the American psychiatrist a.A. Brill who translated a copy of Freud's book, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in 1914 and used the word slip to refer to these mistakes. (Wang 2003:43) Culture and language took over and the term Freudian Slip came into being and is now the more common term for speech errors used by laymen today. However even Freud noted in his book that he was not the first to observe these parapraxes. His linguistic predecessors, Merringer and Mayer, were the one of the first to really analyze and catalogue these errors in human speech.

I am in the exceptional position of being about to refer to a previous work on the subject. In the year 1895 Meringer and C. Mayer published a study on Mistakes in Speech and Reading, with whose view-points I do not agree. One of the authors, who is the spokesman in the text, is a philologist actuated by a linguistic interest to examine the rules governing those slips. He hoped to deduce from these rules the existence 'of a definite psychic mechanism,' 'whereby the sounds of a word, of a sentence, and even the words themselves, would be associated and connected with one another in a quite peculiar manner. (Freud 1916:72)

Merringer and Mayer conducted a more traditional analysis that categorized these errors within a more linguistic and phonetic organisation as relating to language usage and syntax. However, as Freud attests, he did not totally agree that it was simply a mechanical phenomenon without any relevance to the psyche or the unconscious mind. He analyzed them as if they were processes that would circumvent our usual restraint system and cause certain darker parts of our nature to surface, the unconscious mind in particular. He felt that speech blunders as well as other forms of fehlleistungs were a way to tell everyone what one was rally thinking without it being couched in a more civilized fashion:

In other and more significant cases it is a self-criticism, an internal contradiction against one's own utterance, which causes the speechblunder, and even forces a contrasting substitution for the one intended. We then observe with surprise how the wording of an assertion removes the purpose of the same, and how the error in speech lays bare the inner dishonesty. Here the lapsus linguœ becomes a mimicking form of expression, often, indeed, for the expression of what one does not wish to say. It is thus a means of self-betrayal. (Freud 1916:101)

While Merringer and Mayer certainly had a point that many blunders in speech were simply a mechanical effective error caused by sounds that the brain hears and then relates them to other words with similar sounds or patterns, Freud still objected that this should not be the only explanation:

Among the examples of the mistakes in speech collected by me I can scarcely find one in which I would be obliged to attribute the speech disturbance simply and solely to what Wundt calls "contact effect of sound." Almost invariably I discover besides this a disturbing influence of something outside of the intended speech. The disturbing element is either a single unconscious thought, which comes to light through the speechblunder, and can only be brought to consciousness through a searching analysis, or it is a more general psychic motive, which directs itself against the entire speech. (Freud 1916:80)

Freud also realised that there are certainly occasions when these errors in speech were simply just mistakes and not associated with any larger psychic relevance (sometimes a Cigar is just a cigar). He came up with the following criteria to judge when these error had an important position in psychoanalysis:

In order to belong to this class of phenomena thus explained a faulty psychic action must satisfy the following conditions:

a. It must not exceed a certain measure, which is firmly established through our estimation, and is designated by the expression "within normal limits." b. It must evince the character of the momentary and temporary disturbance. The same action must have been previously performed more correctly, or we must always rely on ourselves to perform it more correctly; if we are corrected by others we must immediately recognize the truth of the correction and the incorrectness of our psychic action.

c. If we at all perceive a faulty action, we must not perceive in ourselves any motivation of the same, but must attempt to explain it through "inattention" or attribute it to an "accident." (Freud 1916:278)

Freud may be much maligned in some circles, even by some of his pupil like Jung, but it was his distinction to set the world of psychology on the road to the unconscious. Through dreams, nightmares, and even these slips of the tongue he perceived a depth of narrative clues and symbolic interpretations that had the potential to reveal heretofore unknown territories of the psyche. These areas had previously held a secret lock on our psyches until Freud puzzled over them and gave these errors of speech more significance than anyone had previously imagined. (Coles, 2000, p. 1)

It was a triumph for the interpretative art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics: that is to say, they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by analytic means. (Strachey 1959: 113)

There are now as many ways of looking at parapraxes as there are names for the phenomena. Linguists tend to separated them into their phonetic and semantic categories while psychologist look at them for what they may reveal on an more individual case by case basis. After Merringer and Mayer conducted their initial analysis, other linguist pick up the quest and began to further examine the theoretical reasons behind errors in speech. According to linguistics, a speech error is generally defined as a statement or expression, either written or spoken that is different from the intended wording that the speaker or writer planned. However, these errors have certain systematic properties that define them in some more specific way. (Fromkin 1980: 13; Loritz 2002: 117) Furthermore, when the person is told of what they have done, often they do not believe or even realise they have done so, often vehemently denying it until they are confronted by a contrary view from their audience. They then immediately perceive the error and attempt to excuse or ignore it. (Aitchison 1998: 244)

If, then, prohibited strivings may distort ideas or replace them by others, there is sufficient reason to assume that memories in general are brought to consciousness by those strivings which they express. It is, however, only in parapraxes and other extreme cases that this becomes palpable. If this interpretation of parapraxes is correct, psychoanalytic theory and experience have implications concerning the role of "affective factors" not only in forgetting but also in remembering. (Rapaport 1942: 149)

It is important here to have some framework with which to discuss parapraxes

Aitchison, as a psycholinguist blends both the disciplines of psychology and linguistics to give a more balanced view overall. She proposes first two broad definitions for type of parapraxis. (1998: 244) the first is when a wrong item or word is unintentionally chosen, these are generally referred to as slips of the tongue and an example would be, "Did you remember to buy some toothache?" Replacing the word toothpaste, which was intended, with toothache, which was unintended. She also refers to these more properly as slips of the brain. Secondly there is a classification of errors that are due to the faulty assemblages of the language within the statement. The word choice is usually correct but the grammatical assemblage of the statement is not. Here is an example she uses of this:, "Someone's been writening threat letters." In this case the correct root words are present but the grammar and syntax is incorrect and should have read, "Someone's been writing threatening letters." (1998: 244)

Furthermore, Aitchison then goes on to classify these two categories into several sub-categories. Regarding the first and most common category is that of word selection of which she propose these three subcategories: semantic errors, malapropisms and blends. (Aitchison 1998: 244)

So-called semantic or similar meaning errors are fairly common. In fact, they are so usual that they often pass unnoticed. We are talking about naming errors in which the speaker gets the general 'semantic field' right, but uses the wrong word, as in DO YOU HAVE ANY ARTICHOKES? I'M SORRY, I MEAN AUBERGINES. This kind of mistake often affects pairs of words. People say LEFT when they mean 'right', UP when the (Aitchison 1998: 244)

Cognitive psychology also recognises that the unconscious plays a role in these type of common errors of semantics and can often lead to embarrassing mistakes in speech. Sexual repression often gives way to replacement words that can suggests that extraneous sexual operating in conjunction with those to which the speaker was attempting to say. This can cause the activation of a counter word to spread through associated items in the speaker's speech pattern often having a cascading effect. (Bear 1992: 175)

The second type of word selection error, so-called malapropisms occur when a person confuses a word with another, similar sounding one. The name comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan's play the Rivals, who continually confused words which sounded alike, as in SHE'S as HEADSTRONG as an ALLEGORY on the BANKS of the NILE (She's as headstrong as an alligator on the banks of the Nile) and a NICE DERANGEMENT of EPITAPHS (a nice arrangement of epithets). (Aitchison 1998: 245)

Here the use is often rather comical, but it still may possess an underlying psychoanalytic foundation, especially when these errors are made by other than actors or comedians. As Freud has stated many the reason for these errors are often beyond our immediate awareness. Yet there is often a sudden and spontaneous outburst that can bring that awareness into consciousness. Freud calls this preconscious, 'The preconscious is much closer to the conscious than to the unconscious because it is largely within our control.' (Freud 2003:17) This allows the speaker a level of understanding not normally available otherwise.

The third type of selection error, so-called blends, are an extension and variation of semantic errors. They are fairly rare, and occur when two words are 'blended' together to form one new one. For example, NOT in the SLEAST contains a mixture of 'slightest and least'. And PLEASE EXPLAND THAT is a mixture of 'explain and expand'. (Aitchison, 1998, p. 246)

Here it seems that these types of errors do not fit really Freud's psychoanalytic categories as mentioned earlier I this paper. These seem to be simple innocent mistakes of blending one word or idea into the next. This is merely the result of the speaker thinking faster than he or she can speak. This event is similar to a typist who has generated genuine typos in which words are transposed or letters left out, because of the typist's thoughts moving faster than his or her hands can reproduce. These errors are in large part due to the mechanical working of the brain rather than any preconscious implications.

Going on to the second larger classification, that of assemblage errors, Aitchison divides these again into three subcategories: 'transpositions, anticipations and repetitions, which may affect words, syllables or sounds.' (1998: 247)

Transpositions are not, on the whole, very common. Whole words can switch places, as in DON'T BUY a CAR WITH ITS TAIL in the ENGINE (Don't buy a car with its engine in the tail) but perhaps the best known are the sound transpositions known as spoonerisms. These are named after a real-life person, the Reverend William a. Spooner, who was Dean and Warden of New College, Oxford, around the turn of the century. Reputedly, he often transposed the initial sounds of words, resulting in preposterous sentences, such as...YOU HAVE HISSED ALL MY MYSTERY LECTURES (You have missed all my history lecture) (Aitchison1998: 247)

Again this type of error is also largely linguistic in nature and tells us more about how the brain works and how language truly operates than it does about any psychological meaning of personality.

The next category of assemblage errors, anticipations, are certainly one of the most common of these parapraxes. They are involved in both the anticipation of sounds as well as words.

Here, a speaker anticipates what he is going to say by bringing in an item too early. Note that it is not always possible to distinguish between anticipations and potential transpositions if the speaker stops himself half-way through, after realising his error. This may partially account for the high recorded proportion of anticipations compared with transpositions. For example, the following could be a prematurely cut off transposition:

WANT YOU to TELL MILLICENT... I MEAN, I WANT YOU to TELL MARY WHAT MILLICENT SAID. (Aitchison 1998: 248)

Here there may be a grey area regarding certain anticipation errors. While obviously innocent errors may still belie and reveal an unconscious thought, perhaps the speakers real intentions are becoming clear in transposition the names, wanting to tell Millicent, in this example that Aitchison shows us, instead of Mary. This conceivably is indicative of some underlying animosity or another repressed emotional state that was lying under the surface, then becoming preconscious and surfacing in the anticipation error. For instance this occurrence in Poland's an Analyst's Slip of the Tongue shows the result of such preconscious urges even in a trained psychotherapist:

Here again," I said, "when you have an urge to do it your own way, even start to feel having your own idea, a mind of your own, you feel you are betraying the other person and killing yourself, I mean, the other person." It was my slip that substituted herself for the other as the object of murderous impulses. We had long ago known that undoing of herself was the result of her pattern, but we had not before directly focused on the self-punishing quality as a derivative wish in its own right. When I made my slip, I had not been thinking consciously of aggression turned against herself. (Poland 1992:85)

In this instance the therapist's slip has allowed the patient an insight into her own unconscious aggression towards herself that she had been repressing.

Repetitions (or perseverations) are rather rarer than anticipations, though commoner than transpositions. We find repeated words, as in:

A: ISN'T it COLD? MORE LIKE a SUNDAY in FEBRUARY.

B: IT'S NOT TOO BAD - MORE LIKE a FEBRUARY in MARCH I'D SAY (it's not too bad - more like a Sunday in March).

An example of a repeated sound occurred when someone referred to: THE BOOK by CHOMSKY and CHALLE (Chomsky and Halle) - perhaps an indication of the mesmerizing effect of Chomsky on a number of linguists! (Aitchison 1998: 248-249)

The reason that repetitions are relatively unusual is that because most people have a built in neurological mechanism that effectively 'wipes the slate clean' after saying the selected word or phrase:

the phonetic form no longer remains to clutter up the mind. This is perhaps the greatest single difference between ordinary people and dysphasics, who often, to their frustration and despair, repeatedly repeat sounds and words from the sentence before. (Aitchison 1998:249)

In his book the Psychology of Language Trevor Harley further elucidates speech errors in to the following table.

Type

Utterance

Target

Feature perseveration

Turn the knop knob

Phoneme anticipation

The mirst of May first

Phoneme perseveration

God rest re merry gentlemen ye

Phoneme exchange

Do you reel feally bad?

I feel really bad

Affix deletion

The chimney catch fire catches fires

Phoneme deletion

Backgound lighting background

Word blend

The chung of today children+young

Word exchange

Guess whose mind came to name?

A whose name came to mind

Morpheme exchange randomed some samply sampled some randomly

Word substitution

Get me a fork spoon

Phrase blend

Miss you a very much + a great deal

(Harley 2001:352)

Basing his research on both Fromkin and Aitchison, Harley has devised a more straightforward and comprehensive look at both the linguistic and psychological meanings behind the phenomena of parapraxism. He also notes that purists like Noam Chomsky have a very different view of language. 'Chomsky argued that language is a special feature which is innate, species-specific, and biologically pre-programmed, and which is a faculty independent of other cognitive structures.' (Harley 2001:33) This independence had lead many to believe that these slips are not as unconsciously derived as many psychotherapists would have us believe. In fact it is more likely, says other Choskiites, that when you are caught calling out the name of a pervious lover in a romantic situation, what you are really doing is merely relying on certain old habits built up over time that the brain falls into to when the individual is not as present as he or she should be in the situation. The calling out of the wrong name is akin to moving a dustbin that has been in the same place for some time. It takes time to change the pattern the brain has set up in order to throw the paper in a different direction.

Freud believed that verbal slips come from repressed desires. However, cognitive psychologists would counter that slips can represent a sequencing conflict in grammar production. Slips may be due to cognitive underspecification that can take a variety of forms -- inattention, incomplete sense data or insufficient knowledge. Secondly, they may be due to the existence of some locally appropriate response pattern that is strongly primed by its prior usage, recent activation or emotional change or by the situation calling conditions (MacMahon, 1995). Some sentences are just susceptible to the process of banalisation: the replacement of archaic or unusual expressions with forms that are in more common use. In other words, the errors were due to strong habit substitution (MacMahon, 1995)

Other have also noted that when certain pressures come to bear, speech error begin to occur out of nervous frustration and fear more than actually revealing the truth about a given situation:

Norbert] Elias suggested that modern society's contact with repugnant behaviour was generally confined to uncovering manifestations of it in psychoanalysis which he characterized as 'an infantile residue'. Certainly such an explanation might characterize some of the early modern speech errors and behavioural mistakes of those who found themselves before the inquisition. (Nash 2007)

Certainly when one is faced with the fear of fate worst than death, this may cause them to make an error or two in their utterances, revealing more of trepidation rather than preconscious information.

Embarrassment and social discomfort may also come into play with these parapraxes.

Considering the following research experiment:

After a brief interaction with a white experimenter, participants completed a set of questionnaires that included various explicit measures of prejudice, followed by a racial-prejudice IAT. They then interacted with a black experimenter. Both experimenters provided ratings of the interaction, as did judges who examined videotapes of the interactions. Impressively, IAT scores related significantly to the experimenters' and the judges' molar ratings of the interaction with the black vs. The white experimenter. In addition, IAT scores indicative of prejudice against blacks were also associated with a variety of micro-behaviors including less speaking time, less smiling, fewer extemporaneous social comments, more speech errors, and more speech hesitations in the interaction with the black (versus white) experimenter. (Fazio and Olson 2003)

Did this experiment prove or disprove racism on the part of the subjects. Did they make errors or lack of conversation in order not to commit what they would have perceived as an offence or does it really reveal a sense of racism inherent in the subject that they would certainly consciously deny.

It is interesting to see how future connections were made by other psychologist that may have disagreed with Freud initially on his interpretation of parapraxes. Carl Jung had been noted as attending many seances in order not only to refute the phenomena but also to examine those mediums who he believed may be regarded as hysterics in some cases. These are the few that truly believed in what they were doing and felt that their powers to speak to the dead were real. When they would go into trance and speak for the departed spirits, Jung would analyse their behaviour more in terms of disassociation as well as also understanding Freud's meaning behind parapraxis, this helped him to:

recognise the importance of the seemingly bungled responses and botched results that the association experiments regularly churned out. Though these were not the voices of the dead in the literal sense of the spiritualist movement, they did point to the presence of unconscious emotional factors and inner resistances - the dead in a psychological sense. (Mogenson 2003:84)

So the dead, or perhaps the shadows of the unconscious mind, were truly finding a voice in these mediumistic states. More insight was perhaps possible when looking as the phenomena as parapraxies instead of just hoaxes.. Jung further went on to parallel this phenomenon with word association as a similar tool to reveal unconscious thought. Much the same as the famous Rorschach inkblots.

It was earlier suggested that certain brain abnormalities contribute to the more malignant forms of speech errors, such as that of dysphasia, Tourette's syndrome and so on. However, these so called damaged individuals may have more in common with those of use who are normal, yet still make such errors:

However, Ellis and Young (1996) have pointed out that the anomic disturbances seen in brain-damaged individuals are, in certain respects, simply more pronounced forms of disturbance that we all experience from time to time. Slips of the tongue, malapropisms, spoonerisms, and the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon are all features of 'normal' language usage, and may be related to brief disruptions of the same processes (or components) that are more severely affected in cases of clinical anomia. At present, the cognitive neuropsychological approach continues to lean more towards psychology than neurophysiology. (Stirling 2002:117-118)

Neuropsychologists have also conducted experiments that elicited a very consistent result in evincing of speech errors in laboratory conditions. It was theorised that if this error could be produced laboratory experiment, it would prove they were linguistic in origin and not psychological. In fact they have termed these triggered reactions Spoonerisms of Laboratory-Induced Predisposition, or SLIP's for short. (Esgate et al. 2004:126) the technique typically involves presenting word pairs to participants one at a time for about 1 sec each. Participants read these pairs silently with the exception of certain cued targets designed to resemble more closely the phonology of the desired spoonerism than the intended target. For example, the target "darn bore" is expected to spoonerise into "barn door" if preceded by pairs in which a word starting with a "b" is followed by one starting with a "d" (for example, ball doze, bash door, bean deck). (Esgate et al. 2004:126)