{"id":3078,"date":"2011-04-08T10:23:43","date_gmt":"2011-04-08T15:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3078"},"modified":"2022-08-19T06:07:49","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T11:07:49","slug":"speech-error-of-the-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3078","title":{"rendered":"Speech error of the week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mike Pence (R-IN), interviewed by Greta van Susteren on Fox News:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Pence Lets The The Truth Slip On His Uncompromising Stance\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HbT4HbDBI1g?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThe critical segment:<\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width: 230px;\"><source src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/Pence1.mp3\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\">Your browser does not support the audio element.<\/audio><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Look we're- we're trying- we're trying to score a victory<br \/>\nfor the Republican people.<br \/>\nFor the Ameri- for the Republican peop-<br \/>\ntrying to score a victory for the American people<br \/>\nnot for the Republican party.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Mark Kleiman <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samefacts.com\/2011\/04\/watching-conservatives\/a-victory-for-the-republican-people\/\">identifies<\/a> this as \"a classic Kinsley-gaffe\", in reference to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.barrypopik.com\/index.php\/new_york_city\/entry\/a_gaffe_is_when_a_politician_tells_the_truth_kinsley_gaffe\/\">Michael Kinsley's remark<\/a> that \"a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth\".<\/p>\n<p>But psycholinguists will recognize this as a classic word-substitution error. Rep. Pence means to say \"&#8230;score a victory for the American people, not for the Republican party\", but (either by exchange or anticipation) he says \"Republican people\" instead of \"American people\", and then has to correct himself.<\/p>\n<p>Freud cited several examples of this sort of thing in his classic monograph <em><a href=\"http:\/\/psychclassics.yorku.ca\/Freud\/Psycho\/\">The Psychopathology of Everyday Life<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0But modern investigations suggest that unconscious desires and fears play at best a very small role in such errors, which are a natural consequence of the instrinsic fragility of the human system for planning and executing spoken phrases. Here's what I wrote about this in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ling.upenn.edu\/courses\/Fall_2010\/ling001\/production_perception.html\">lecture notes<\/a> for Linguistics 001:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Why should mistakes of these kinds occur? The basic facts of the case suggest the reason: talking is a hard thing to do! In fact, fluent speech articulation has been called our most complex motor skill.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Language is a complex and hierarchical system. Language use is creative, so that new utterance is put together on the spot out of the piece-parts made available by the language being spoken. A speaker is under time pressure, typically choosing about three words  per second out of a vocabulary of 40,000 or more, while at the same time producing perhaps five syllables and a dozen phonemes per second, using more than 100 finely-coordinated muscles, each of which has a maximum gestural repetition rate of about three cycles per second or less. Word choices are being made, and sentences constructed, at the same time that earlier parts of the same phrase are being spoken.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Given the complexities of speaking, it's not surprising that about one slip of the tongue on average occurs per thousand words said. In fact, it's surprising that more of us are not like Mrs. Malaprop or Dr. Spooner.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But as I observed in an earlier post on a political slip of the tongue (\"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/001564.html\">Fear North Dakota<\/a>\", 10\/16\/2004),<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">Of course, Freud's analysis of Freudian slips was generally anything but obvious. In\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/psychclassics.yorku.ca\/Freud\/Psycho\/chap1.htm\">chapter one<\/a> of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he devoted 1,200 words and a diagram to explaining why he himself once had trouble retrieving the name of the painter Signorelli. His explanation involved concerns about sexual disfunction among the Turks of Bosnia, and a message that he had gotten a few weeks earlier while staying in the town of Trafoi, and &#8212; well, read it for yourself, I've reproduced it at the end of this post. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>So the anti-Freudian argument can't be the lack of any Freudian explanation for a given slip, but rather the ease of generating speech errors designed to order, by methods that make sense given theories of priming and of the planning and execution of complex motor sequences.<\/p>\n<p>Some other relevant posts: \"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/002563.html\">Never anything but less than precise<\/a>\", 10\/20\/2005; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/004469.html\">The Eternal General of the United States<\/a>\", 5\/5\/2007; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/004579.html\">Republicans and Democratics<\/a>\", 6\/7\/2007;\u00a0\"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/004791.html\">Blunder maven speaks<\/a>\", 8\/5\/2007; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=60\">Name chain nomenclature<\/a>\", 4\/19\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=385\">The dangers of mental search-and-replace<\/a>\", 7\/21\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=524\">Political slips of the tongue<\/a>\", 8\/24\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=533\">2008 political parapraxis II<\/a>\", 8\/26\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=567\">Sarah Pawlenty?<\/a>\", 9\/6\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=694\">My fellow prisoners<\/a>\", 10\/9\/2008; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1477\">Hijab, hajib, whatever<\/a>\", 6\/4\/2009; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2140\">Racist sociolinguistics from El Rushbo?<\/a>\", 2\/25\/2010; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2143\">Aksking again<\/a>\", 2\/26\/2010; \u00a0\"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2896\">Surcame<\/a>\", 1\/9\/2011; \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;cd=2&amp;ved=0CBoQFjAB&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Flanguagelog.ldc.upenn.edu%2Fnll%2F%3Fp%3D3058&amp;rct=j&amp;q=site%3Alanguagelog.ldc.upenn.edu%2Fnll%20%22speech%20error%22&amp;ei=yECfTb7CK4XagAfr-JnsDw&amp;usg=AFQjCNHNLREn2wFuFeGbnDQ_9xNzxXxg-g&amp;cad=rja\">Palin perseverates<\/a>\", 3\/29\/2011.<\/p>\n<p>[Tip of the hat to Victor Steinbok.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mike Pence (R-IN), interviewed by Greta van Susteren on Fox News:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55735,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions\/55735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}