Slip of Tongue, Other Type of Speech Errors

In speaking, people use language as a tool of communication. Field (2003:4) argued that language is very important things to be used by people in the world to communicate each other. On the contrary, people can make errors in using structure of certain language because of some factors. This is because every language has certain roles or structure as component. Even though, actually everybody wants to speak fluently, in the reality, every normal speech contains a fairly large number of such slips, which mostly pass unnoticed as Tom Mc Arthur (1998) argued about that.

A slip of the tongue is one type of speech errors. At the end of the 19th century, the Reverend William A. Spooner, Dean and Warden of New College, Oxford, earned a place in history when a new word based on his name was coined-‘spoonerism’.
He probably would have preferred a different reason for his claim to fame since the word was based on his reputation, perhaps sometimes apocryphal, for producing speech error (unintentional departures from what he meant to say) such as “work is the curse of the drinking classes” when he meant to say “drink is the curse of the working classes”.

Sigmund Freud, a Psychologist (in Fromklin, 1973) analyzed that slips of the tongue phenomenon resulted from repressed thoughts which are revealed by the particular errors which speaker makes. Such errors reveal as much if not much more about the structure of language as they do about repressed thoughts. In other hand, the utterance of slips is actually an intentional movement, addition, deletion, blending, or substitution of material within an utterance or between utterances. (Fromkin 1973, 1980: Stemberger 1983).