Analysis Of Malapropism In The Rivals

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For a long period of time, Malapropisms have been used in literature in order for a character to feign ignorance, such as in Sheridan's play, The Rivals and is based off of a character in the play named Mrs. Malaprop. In the play, Mrs. Malaprop would use words incorrectly. For example, Mrs. Malaprop would substitute the word 'reprehend' for 'aprehend'. However, this feigned ignorance is now known as a speech error termed by psycholinguistics and can happen when words are substituted by an individual, even though the individual might know what the target word should be. In this essay, the theory of how malapropisms are lexicalized will be discussed in terms of the structure of the mental lexicon used in producing and understanding speech. This will be done by looking at Fay and Cutler's article Malapropisms and the Structure of the Mental Lexicon and their hypothesis of the left-to-right theory in accordance to malapropisms and lexicalism. James R. Hurford's article,Malapropisms, Left-to-Right Listing, and Lexicalism, will articulate an oppositional view.

Lexicalization can be defined by Harley (Harley, 2008) as the translation of a word from its semantic representation, or the meaning, of a word to its phonological form, also known as the sound. (Harley, 2008) Lexicalization contains a two-stage process whereby the first stage is meaning based and the second stage is phonologically based. When an individual first produces a word, they go from a semantic level to an intermediate level of individual words, the process of choosing the word is known as lexical selection. (Harley, 2008) The individual then retrieves the phonological form of the word produced in a stage known as phonological encoding. (Harley, 2008 These defintions w...

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...al listing of words in terms of malapropisms are listed as whole words and are determined by the left-to-right model can be considered sufficent if these whole words are listed only by their stem, without the derivational suffix.

This can be completely ruled out when looking at Hurford's theory of the mental lexicon listing words with the derivational and inflectional suffixes already attached to the stem of the word, thus making Fay and Cutler's arguement of the target and error being coincidental, completely void (Hurford, 1981, p. 423). More research would have to be done in order to determine whether or not lexical listings in correlation with malapropisms are done with the whole word, and just the stem or whether or not the whole word contains suffixes and whether or not these words are entirely based off of coincedence by their phonological similarities.

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