The thesis is a study which uses psycholinguistic theories on slips of the tongue to analyze the occurrence of tongue slips in English and Indonesian. It tries to describe the mechanism of slips of the tongue by looking at how tongue slips occur in the two corpora. Also, it would like to explain the properties or characteristics of tongue slips and the universality of the theories of slips of the tongue. The analyses are based on the collected spontaneous speech errors from the two languages. English tongue slips were quoted from Victoria A. Fromkin's collection and Indonesian tongue slips were collected by the writer and her friend.
To be able to look at the mechanism of tongue slips, several theories on the classification of slips of the tongue, the causes of making slips of the tongue, predicting slips of the tongue, and error detection and correction are used. The writer also notes down some hypotheses on slips of the tongue and some findings on the studies of slips of the tongue which are drawn from the work that has been done previously. From the interpretation of the analyses, it can be seen that English and Indonesian tongue slips have some similarities and differences. Hence, not all theories of tongue slips are applicable to both languages.
As a general conclusion, it can be said that slips of the tongue are highly structured and constrained by the linguistic system. There are five constraints of the occurrence of slips of the tongue. The first constraint deals with Wells' three laws on predicting tongue slips, i.e. a slip of the tongue is practically always a phonetically possible noise; if the two original words are rhythmically similar, a blend of them will, with high probability, rhythmically resemble both of them; and if the two original words contain the same sound in the same position, a blend of them will contain that sound in that position. The second and third constraints deal with reversal errors, that is, repeated phonemes usually occur before and after the reversed phonemes, and that there is similarity in the phonetic form of reversed phonemes. The fourth constraint deals with the fact that phonemes in initial syllabic position replace those in initial, nuclear replace nuclear, and final replace final. The last constraint of the occurrence of slips of the tongue deals with semantic errors, that is, a mistakenly selected word always or nearly always belongs to the same word class.
A final suggestion is then given concerning the actual generation of an utterance after looking more closely into the phenomena of the occurrence of tongue slips in English and Indonesian. |