100 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
(planning the linguistic representation of the message); articulating (produ-
cing the physical message through muscular movement) and self-monitoring.
The stage of formulating is of interest in that it may shed some light on the
extent of the lexical elements which occupy a single slot in a grammatical
chain. Fromkin (1973 and 1980) argues that the study of speech errors casts
valuable light on how speakers assemble their messages. If they primarily
assemble their utterances word-like element by word-like element (Sinclair’s
open-choice principle) then there should be no overlap between the
autonomous word-like elements. If however, they usually assemble their
utterances from larger pre-assembled chunks (Sinclair’s idiom principle)
overlap between word-like elements is predicted to occur.
Carroll (1994: 191) and Anderson (1990: 337) both provide the same two
speech errors from the legendary Dr William Spooner,^13 printed as (32)
and (33).
(32) You have hissed (missed)^14 all my mystery (history) lectures.
(33) I saw you fight (light) a liar (fi re) in the back quad; you have
tasted (wasted) the whole worm (term).Examples (32) and (33) suggest that Spooner treated missed all my history
lectures, light a fi re ̧ and wasted the whole term as single chunks and assembled
these examples in line with Sinclair’s idiom principle. Fromkin (1973 and
1980) produced a classifi cation of the major types of errors, of which four
classes are of importance to this study, and are set out in Table 4.1.^15
The examples in Table 4.1 suggest that the speakers treated decides to hit,
nose remodelled,^16 take my bike, and pulled a tantrum as single meaningful
chunks.^17 The evidence gleaned from speech errors indicates that speech is,
at least at times, assembled out of chunks which are larger than ortho-
graphic words. Carroll (1994: 192) comments that:
If you have closely examined these examples, [printed in Table 4.1]
you probably have noticed by now that these types of errors occur with
a number of different linguistic units.Table 4.1 Major types of speech errors occurring beyond the orthographic word
Type Example
Shift That’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it (decides to hit it)
Exchange Fancy getting your model renosed (nose remodelled)
Anticipation Bake my bike (take my bike)
Perseveration He pulled a pantrum (pulled a tantrum)