ABSTRACT
The aim of this research is to discover the slips of the tongue in language of the businessmen in their dealings with their customers and to find out the frequency of these errors. Slips of the tongue is an unintentional speech error that occur sometimes in our communication most likely due to the unconsciousness of our mind in situations like nervousness, stress, excitement etc. The method used to collect data is recordings of the businessmen of the Liberty Market of Faisalabad, which are transcribed according to the transcription markers given in the British National Corpus manual and then the data was analyzed in AntConc and the frequency of the errors was found accordingly.
The result shows three kinds of slips of the tongue which are sound exchange error, morpheme exchange error and word exchange error. The most dominantly occurred error was morpheme exchange error. There is no such treatment of this speech error but we can avoid it by being out of the situations mentioned above, by being conscious of what we are saying, by getting proper rest etc.
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Introduction
Psycholinguistics explores the relationship between human mind and language. (John Field: 2003). Another definition of psycholinguistics is as follows “Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood. (Alan Garnham: January 22, 1985).”
Pronunciation is one of indicators used to score the ability of speaking (Arthur Hughes: 2003) English pronunciation involves the production of each sound and pronunciation of words, phrases, and sentences with correct spelling, compressing and/or correct intonation. For the non-native speakers, pronunciation is one of the most important parts in English communication because by using good pronunciation, we can avoid misunderstanding between the speakers (Harmer: 2000, Dalton: 1998, Angelina Tieneke Sugiarto: 2013, Syarif Hidayatullah: 2016).
Speech error is the process in which speakers most likely to pause after the first word or to utter a false start.(Boomer, 2013:89). The first word in most of them is a function word: an article, preposition, pronoun, etc. Speech error is a psycholinguistics analysis that relies on the mental process of a speech, while speech disfluency relies on the speech disorder on aphasia. There are a number of speech/language disorders and slip of the tongue is one of them. Slip of the tongue are speech errors in which intended utterances are rearranged between other words or sounds. (Antony Tran) A slip of the tongue, or tongue slip, has been defined as 'an involuntary deviation in performance from the speaker's current phonological, grammatical or lexical intention' (Boomer & Laver 1968:4)
This definition has three important elements. Firstly, slips are involuntary, i.e., unintentional. Secondly, slips represent a deviation in performance, not a lack of competence. That is, the intended utterance is well-formed, and the slip occurs in the execution of that intention. Slips are usually detected, not necessarily consciously and, since the speaker knows the intended well- formed utterance, can be corrected. Thirdly, slips may occur in various features of the utterance (phonological, grammatical and lexical), and may therefore give insights into the processes of speech production. (Boomer & Laver 1968:4)
The types of slips of the tongue are
- Morpheme-exchange error – in which morphemes change places.
- Sound-exchange error- in which two sounds switch places.
- Word-exchange error- in which a word-exchange error is a subcategory of lexical selection errors.(Wikipedia)
Literature Review
To make a conversation with other persons, everyone needs to transmit their message, idea, feelings or information to produce their own speech. There are four production stages: design, formulate, articulate and monitor. For the steps we make errors either in the first language or the second language, actively or subconsciously. Jurn Moller et. al 2006 along with his other research partners stated that Talking is a very quick and fairly simple process where speech mistakes are uncommon in common topics. Although behavioral models integrate robust control processes to deter and correct mistakes, brain regions involved have remained elusive.
We have different brain processes prior to the vocalization of these spoonerisms using event- related brain capacity in a process proven to generate spoonerisms reflecting a particular group of sound errors. Core modeling placed the behavior in the medial frontal cortex on the additional motor region. They suggest the simultaneous activation of 2 opposing speech plans on processing scales, in relation to the creation of a very ' ' phonetic '' voice plan contrasting with the conventional approach, suggesting that the main source of sound error is abstract phonological representations. Bernard J. Bar in his research examined that Spoonerisms (e.g. bad goof— gad boof) can be caused by objects articulating a target (bad goof) followed by biological entities containing at least the initial phoneme of the intended error outcome. This study takes advantage of the fact that two very similar targets like bore and dartboard are frequently very different (i.e. error outcome the barn door outcome is significant while bart doard is not) Any systematical difference in error rate between these target types must be attributed to the processes that take place after the target is registered accordingly. The effect of editing procedures that only apply to the error result can thus be specifically evaluated and not to the target word pair It is shown that L outcomes are much more common for lexical (L) targets than nonsense (N) outcomes. For N targets, the same generalization is obtains, but only in the context of a lexical filler item. The general spoonerism rate does not differ based on the lexical status of the error result unless the context clearly contains the other lexical elements. This addresses logical consequences.
Research Method
The quantitative descriptive approach is used in this research. It is used to analyze the businessmen’s pronunciation of slip of tongue and served the research finding by data’s description. The location of this research was Liberty Market, Bhoana Bazar Faisalabad. The subject of research was 8 businessmen of garments’ market and they all are bilingual using English and Urdu vocabulary in their dealings. It used purposive (selective or subjective) sampling. Thus, the research included the recordings of these businessmen during their dealings with their customers. Recordings were taken from only 8 participants because these errors are almost common throughout the market. A total of 24 recordings were taken from the participants. Three recordings were taken from each participant on three different days, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday which is 26, 27 and 28 November 2019, respectively. In this research, the researchers transcribed the recordings according to the transcription markers given in the British National Corpus (BNC) manual. The transcription marker for slip of the tongue which is related to the false start is = . For the three types of the selected errors we used the transcription markers =1(Sound exchange), =2(morpheme exchange) and =3(word exchange). Then the researchers used the corpus tool AntConc 3.5.8 to analyze the data they have collected. Using the transcription markers in the search bar the researchers collected the frequency of different types of slips of the tongue. The researcher followed multiple steps.
Firstly, the researchers took the recordings. Secondly, the researchers transcribed the utterances using BNC manual. Thirdly, the researchers analyzed the slips of the tongue by uploading the data in AntConc tool 3.5.8 and analyzing it. Fourthly, the researchers described the findings and the results related to the object of study. Finally, the researchers made general conclusion according to the research findings about slips of the tongue happened in the language of the businessmen of the Liberty Market, Faisalabad.
Conclusion
Slip of the tongue errors found in the language of the businessmen of the Liberty Market contain 3 kinds of slip of the tongue. These three kinds are slip of the tongue at sound level (sound error), Morpheme exchange which includes substitution of free morphemes(meaningful words) and the change in the functional morphemes as well and third kind is word exchange error. There are more errors but they are not very frequent so the focus of the researchers is on these 3 prominent errors. Slips of the tongue at free morpheme (word) level occurred dominantly. It happened because these kind of slips of tongue also known as Freudian slips. It is a verbal mistake that is believed to be linked to the unconscious mind. It is an unintentional error that occur in speech. This mistake is therefore not called a flaw, but rather a subconscious thought that falls out in voice. Freudian slips got their name from Sigmund Freud who is a psychiatrist. He said that the mistakes that we utter in our communication have meanings and they should not be considered as mistakes at all, but in our voice our unconscious mind drops. When the businessmen uttered the words in hurry, in pressure, or in nervousness, or when feeling tired, or having less of vocabulary at that moment etcetera, these situations make their unconscious mind falling into their speech and substituted some words to others.
References
- Field.J_Psycholinguistics_A_Resource_Book_For_Students_2003
- Boomer, D. S. & J. D. M. Laver. 1968. 'Slips of the tongue.' In British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 3, 2-12.
- Möller, J., Jansma, B. M., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Münte, T. F. (2006). What the brain does before the tongue slips. Cerebral Cortex, 17(5), 1173-1178.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_of_the_Tongue
- Garnham, Alan. Psycholinguistics: Central Topics. Methuen, 1985. https://fatchulfkip.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/psycholinguistics/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_error
- Baars, B.J., Motley, M.T., & MacKay, D.G. (1975). Output Editing for Lexical Status in Artificially Elicited Slips of the Tongue. http://mercercognitivepsychology.pbworks.com/w/page/33015683/Slip-of-the-Tongue%20Errors
- STEVE CROWDY, Spoken Corpus Transcription, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1994, Pages 25–28
- Zheng, Qi. Slips of the Tongue in Second Language Production. Sino-US English Teaching. Volume 3, No.7 (Serial No.31). p.71-74. July.
- Savitri. Meaning of descriptive question. Merit answers (Online). July 11th 2016. (accessed on March 17, 2018)
- Fowler, Carol A. (1982). Errors in linguistic performance: Slips of the Tongue, Ear, Pen and Hand, edited by V. Fromkin. In Slips of the Tongue and Language Production, A. Cutler (ed.), 265-286. Amsterdam: Mouton.
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