By: Joe Green
In their collection of 1,028 word-substituiion errors Nice irony, especially given the later mention of typing errors. Glad to see you don't have automatic spell-checking on.
View ArticleBy: Brett
@Matt Juge: I was actually surprised to learn how much of sports commentary involved working from prepared notes. It was demonstrated very clearly during one long inter-league baseball game between the...
View ArticleBy: Ben Zimmer
Matthew Dowd was previously featured for a speech error in my post from last December, "Newt's not not engaging." Don't know if he's particularly prone to such slip-ups.
View ArticleBy: Michael W
I wonder if "Obama took [the] presiden[cy]" was a possibility for Dowd as well. 'nelements' to me almost sounds like 'announcement' (or even 'pronouncement'?) giving way to something else midway through.
View ArticleBy: J.W. Brewer
I couldn't access the Harley/MacAndrew article, but did their 2% of speech errors that did substitute across syntactic categories itself have any sort of pattern that would make this error more or less...
View ArticleBy: MattF
I'd imagine that you get different patterns of errors in competitive punditry speech, compared with errors in normal speech.
View ArticleBy: Maryellen MacDonald
The Emmorey/Fromkin and Harley/MacAndrew articles are both discussing common speech errors in which the speaker has converged on a single syntactic structure for the utterance plan but has mis-selected...
View ArticleBy: boris
"that's going to advantage our side": I find this construction odd. Is "advantage" as a verb common? I see that Dictionary.com has it, but it still sounds wrong to me. [(myl) It's reasonably common —...
View ArticleBy: Andy Averill
@Maryellen MacDonald, that sounds right to me. I was a little taken aback by that 2% figure for errors caused by switching from one syntactic category to another. There aren't many things in life that...
View ArticleBy: seriously
A buddy of mine purchased a beach house and was suggesting to a woman in our office, well known for her love for the beach, that she would be welcome to visit. He evidently wanted to say to her either...
View ArticleBy: Rubrick
It seems that Dowd's lexical preprocessor knew something was going awry; there's a short but noticeable hesitation before "advantageous". My impression is that he sensed he'd misconstructed the phrase...
View ArticleBy: Maryellen MacDonald
@Andy Averill, yes, I think that the pressure to speak when cued and to speak quickly on TV shows definitely increases errors. Note that the 2% figure is 2% of specifically word-level speech errors,...
View ArticleBy: David Morris
Has any research been done into the prosody of word substitution errors? Substituting "ad-van-TA-geous" for "ad-VAN-tage" requires changing the flow and stress of the words, even at the speed of this...
View ArticleBy: Trevor Harley
If anyone wants a copy of the speech error paper email me at t.a.harley@NOSPAMdundee.ac.uk (and remove the NOSPAM) of course. Very interesting! And thanks Maryellen.
View ArticleBy: Chandra
Maybe some weird eggcorny interpretation of "advantageous" as "advantage us"?
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