‘Slips
of the tongue’ or ‘speech errors’ in which we deviate in some way from the
intended utterance show phonological rules in action. Some of these tongue
slips are called spoonerisms, after William Archhiblad Spooner, a distinguished head of an Oxford college in the late 1800s
and early 1900s who is reported to have said to a class of students ‘You have
hissed my mystery lecture’ instead of the intended ‘You have missed my history
lecture’, ‘You have tasted the whole wrom’ instead of ‘You have wasted the
whole term’, and other such errors. We all make speech errors, however, and
they tell us interesting things about language and its use. Consider the
following speech errors :
In
the first example, the final consonants of the first and third words were reversed.
Notice that the reversal of the consonants also changed the nasality of the
vowels. The first vowel /ɒ/ was nasalised [ɒ~] in the intended utterance; in
the actual utterance the nasalisation was ‘lost’, because it no longer occurred
before a nasal consonant. The vowel in the third word, which was the non-nasal
[i] in the intended utterance, became [ɪ~] in the error, because it was
followed by /n/. The nasalisation rule applied.
In the other two errors, we see the application of the
aspiration rule. In the intended stick, the /t/ would have been realised as
unaspirated because it is not syllable initial; when it was switched with the
/m/ in mud, it was pronounced as the aspirated [th], because it occurred
initially. The third example also illustrates the application of the aspiration
rule in performance.
