Sweeping rakes
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Listening to the news on the radio during my drive into the city this morning, I heard the weather reporter say this, "Looking out the window, I saw my neighbor sweeping rakes".
Without missing a beat, she made an instantaneous auto-correction: "raking leaves".
What struck me powerfully is that grammar outweighed lexicon. The grammar was fixed, while the vocabulary had to be altered to fit the right part of speech. Her language wires got switched, a neuron misfired, but in a nanosecond, without even thinking or explaining, she produced the intended sentence.
Selected readings
- "The phenomenology of error" (1/11/09)
- "Even more Phenomenology of Error" (1/11/09)
The weather reporter's error is of a different category than the type discussed in the above two posts, but exactly what kind it is needs to be discussed.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 6, 2025 @ 8:10 am
Does the science confirm this? — that the grammatical structure precedes semantic content? What would Chomsky say?
Andrew McCarthy said,
November 6, 2025 @ 8:16 am
Hey, "sweeping rakes" is an important job, as Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons can attest!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4
Jerry Packard said,
November 6, 2025 @ 9:52 am
Chomsky doesn’t like to talk about speech error or other kinds of ‘dirty’ (I.e., applied) speech data. What psycholinguists would say is that a semantic message results in the building of a syntactic frame that is then populated with lexical items following lexical retrieval. So, speech errors like this usually involve displacement of lexical items in the syntactic frame. The evidence of this is seen in the fact that the morphological inflections usually stay in place when the lexical items are misplaced. So, -ing and -es stay put while the lexical forms (lexemes) move.
Rodger C said,
November 6, 2025 @ 10:35 am
To be distinguished from raking forests so they don't catch fire, which was a total misfire (ahem) of knowledge about the world.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 6, 2025 @ 3:21 pm
Calling Spooner.
JPL said,
November 6, 2025 @ 5:26 pm
Alternative description: "Looking out the window, I saw my neighbor sweeping leaves, with a rake". An accurate description, even poetic, just not colloquial. (And it's not like "eating peas with a knife". You can sweep leaves with a broom.) But the colloquial expression was not adequate to express her striking visual impression. "Raking leaves" is a dud; "sweeping leaves" can be pronounced grandly, with the summit of the intonation contour, as (perhaps) the sweeping was being done with exuberance.
Julian said,
November 6, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
I feel a Magritte painting coming on.