Malapropism (presentation)

 

Requirements

What make’s a sentence malapropism? In order for an error, to be a malapropism, it has to meet 3 requirements:

1.   The error is a real word,

 

  1. The target and the error seem unrelated in meaning.

 

  1. There is a close relation between the pronunciation of the target and the pronunciation of the error.

 

This will mean that omissions, anticipation, spoonerism, and other types of speech errors are excluded from being malapropisms.

 

For example

When panets (planets) pass each other.

Cabbot and carriage (Carrot and cabbage)

 

A third class of error that is not malapropism, are semantic errors. These errors consist of saying the antonym of the intended word. Other semantic errors involve substitution of body parts or articles of clothing or changes in a semantic feature:

 

Don’t burn your toes fingers

He got hot under the belt collar

The two contemporary adjacent buildings

Not Thackeray, but someone that wrote below before Thackeray.

 

 

Mental lexicon

The term mental lexicon derives from the Greek word lexicon, which means book. The Latin word lexis means word. The Mental Lexicon is the systematic organization of the words represented in our minds. Without the mental lexicon, the linguistic production (speaking/writing/listening and reading) would be long and laborious. Besides, it would not accurately represent one’s thought. Often, an analogy (a printed dictionary) is illustrated in order to make the whole picture clear, as the usage is basically similar to that of a dictionary. However, there is a big difference between a printed dictionary and the mental lexicon. Whereas dictionary only allow access to words by there alphabetically ordered spelling, and not by any of their other properties (meaning, grammatically), the mental lexicon will provide more help, as it will find definitions, grammatical patterns and everything you have picked up of the language. The storage is however organized in a complex manner, through links between phonologically and semantically related words. Due to one’s vocabulary ever growing, some words would be thrown out of one’s lexicon, because one never uses it. Even though the mental lexicon seems perfect, it also stores and makes links with misheard and understanding mistakes.

 

How does it work?

So how does it work?

 

 

Causes of the errors might be:

  • Childhood slip of the ear.
  • Oh, never mind ® oh, lever mind

Slips of the ear are misperceptions of an intended speech. A listener reports hearing, as clearly and distinctly as any correctly perceived stretch of speech something that doesn’t correspond to the speaker’s actual utterance (sentence)

  • A reanalysis of the folk-etymological variety
  • Bubonic plague ® Blue Bonnet plague

Because of the lack of cultural, historical or terminology knowledge, the speaker doesn’t know what this saying means. Bubonic plague refers to the Black Death that occurred throughout Europe. It is a variety of the plague.

  • Fault in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon
  • Then the doctor gave me some kind of anecdote (antidote ®anecdote)

This last case is an error without the speaker knowing about it. When the speaker tries to find a word, the speaker accidently picked the wrong word. Whilst using it, the speaker accepts the actual utterance in place of the target. This results into actual utterance being stored in the mind lexicon instead of the target

  • Wrong usage of the word

This cause might be the most well known cause of malapropism. Simply due to the fact that the speaker doesn’t know the correct definition of the word, the word is used in the wrong context. This also applies to Mrs Malaprop.

 

There is also the occurrence that one might know the definition of the word, however, one still might make the mistake of using the incorrect word. The speaker knows about this speech error most of the time.

There are a couple of theories about why we all make these speech errors.

 

The new theory

This theory involves the mental lexicon. After finishing the research about malapropism, both English Linguistic expert Fay and Cutler came to the conclusion that there is just one mental lexicon. With just one mental lexicon, one can optimize the process of looking for the right words. Earlier it was thought that there were mental lexicons for both production and comprehension. However, due to the many words and links they have, it would be very tedious and exhausting for the mind to find all the relative and corresponding words. This idea however narrowed down the reason why one would make malapropisms.

 

First off, if there is just one mental lexicon, one might expect a neighbour or a “near neighbour” word to sound similar to the target. Because the word is almost phonetically alike, it’s more likely that one would choose it’s “neighbour” by mistake, without the error bearing any relation in meaning with the target.

 

There is a possibility that the mental lexicon is organised in a Syntactic (grammatically) system by sound. This is thought because the error and the target belong to same syntactic category. However, this isn’t proven due to not having strong arguments on both sides of this speculation.

 

The correspondence of syllable structure and stress pattern between target and error might suggest that these two properties are the principles of the arrangement for the mental lexicon. This means that the entries are categorised on syllable structure and/or stress pattern within the sound category. This will be useful in comprehension, as a part of the sentence can be sent into words before it begins, so you can look the definitions up in the dictionary.

 

The lexical search the difference between the comprehension category system where it needs to retrieve the important information in the speech signal from the irrelevant environmental noise, and the production mechanism, that needs to overcome the internal. The comprehension system must be designed to find alternative choices, when comparing the incoming signal with the lexical entries. This lead to the theory of the list’ entries having similar phonological properties “near” each other. Both Cutler and Fay concluded that firstly, the arrangement of the lexicon is by phonological segments for the purpose of aiding comprehension. Secondly, the accessing of the arrangement for production is through a network.

 

In conclusion:

  • There is a singe dictionary used for production and comprehension.
  • In this dictionary, words are arranged by phonemic structure.
  • The major partitioning of the dictionary, seems to be by a number of syllables, with stress pattern as a second categorization within a syllable category
  • Words may also be arranged by syntactic category.

 

References

Fay, D., and Cutler, A. (1977) Malapropisms and the Structure of the Mental Lexicon   

Zwicky, A.M. Classical-Malapropisms

Wikipedia