Speech Errors as Presented in the Literature of Linguistics

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Introduction:

Speech errors serve as a window to investigate speech production and arrangement of language elements in the brain. Gary S. Dell and Peter A. Reich (1980) said that one of the best way to find out how a system is constructed is if that system breaks. Speech errors as a linguistic phenomenon has been the topic of many linguistic researches. It can be investigated as an evidence for linguistic change as well. Bussmann and Hadumod (1996) in the Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics defines speech errors as " (Latin: lapsus linguae), is a deviation (conscious or unconscious) from the apparently intended form of an utterance." (449).

Interest in speech errors started many decades ago. Historically in the sixteenth century, several writers used it as a source of humor. For example, Henry Peacham in his book complete gentleman (1622) refers to a melancholy gentleman who says "sir, I must go dye a beggar" instead of "I must go buy a dagger ". Speech errors have been under scope since the 8th century, when the Arab linguist Alkisai (1915) wrote his book Errors of the Populace. He was interested in such errors because he believed that such errors may provide insight into how language change. Recently, speech errors have been studied in several fields of linguistics as being a source of the history of linguistic change, a mean for understanding the speech production and to gain insight into psycholinguistics. The scope of those researches is not to find out why the speech errors happen, but how they occur and how the people arrange linguistic structures as they speak. An investigation of such speech errors has been spotted in many researches. As David Crystal (2001) has noted, studies of tongue'...

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