Many people have seen the video of a bear in a forest stumbling across its own reflection in a mirror and destroying the mirror in the mistaken belief that the mirror is a threat to itself. Cats and dogs sometimes… Continue Reading →
It is relatively simple to measure speech rate and pause length in spoken output. Consider this audio sample here:
Most Prime Ministers rise and fall. Liz Truss seems to fall then rise – in her spoken discourse, that is. In this post, I present a brief analysis of the some of the prosodic features of the Prime Minister’s language… Continue Reading →
Slips of the Tongue from the Linguistic Graveyard: One shit, two c*nts and a Brexit Breakfast! by Michael Cribb
A single speech error (slip of the tongue) often cascades into multiple errors within the space of a few words as Boris Johnson found out yesterday. This has to be one of the all-time great slips that linguists will be… Continue Reading →
Many commentators and broadcasters have fallen foul of Jeremy Hunt’s name over the years. Some make light of the slip, some ignore it, others apologise profusely. Hunt himself has acknowledged the problems people have had with his surname over the… Continue Reading →
A lot was made on Twitter of Helen Watley’s appearance on Sky TV this morning. The claim by some distractors was that Whatley was saying that the government could blame scientists for mistakes made in the COVID-19 policy. Within ten… Continue Reading →
An interesting slip of the tongue here by Kay Burley, Sky news presenter, which can almost be called an internal Spoonerism.
Michael Gove, Conservative MP, serves up some curious hand gestures while speaking including teacup gestures and steeple Vulcans. Here are some of the more interesting examples from his interview on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday.
The dreaded Brexit slip strikes again!
Slips of the tongue (speech errors) nearly always include some repair whereby the speaker realises the mistake and then attempts to correct for their error.
Speech errors (slips of the tongue) often ‘borrow’ from language in the mind that is downstream of the target language. Here is a good example from Theresa May at PMQs.
Slips of the tongue can be annoying for interviewers when they happen once. But when one error leads into another and then another, all in the space of a few words, it can be triply frustrating.
Vince Cable should perhaps leave sexual innuendos to others after fluffing his lines at the Liberal Democrats’ conference on Tuesday. Cable had intended to say that hard-line Tories were locked in an ‘erotic spasm’ over Brexit, but instead the words… Continue Reading →
An interesting slip of the tongue by Theresa May at Prime Minister’s question time occurred on Wednesday and suggested that perhaps we had voted for rather more than we thought during the EU referendum in 2016!
Two slips of the tongue from the BBC.
Two slips of the tongues here, courtesy of BBC presenters.
Slips of the tongue can be useful for understanding the psycholinguistic processing of speech output. Here is an interesting slip that occurred with a news reader on the BBC.
Pausing briefly while speaking is a natural part of delivery. We pause for several reason. The most obvious one is to take breath so we can carry on speaking. Some pauses occur before content words or complex clauses suggesting that… Continue Reading →
For a brief moment, the world thought that Donald Trump had renamed the United Nations when he called them the Unated Nations during his speech to the General Assembly. This slip of the tongue occurred due to ‘anticipation’ which is when… Continue Reading →
Slips of the tongue are a normal part of speech. It is very difficult for anyone to speak at length without stumbling over their words briefly. This is particularly true for television commentators as this Sky correspondent (Mark Stone) found… Continue Reading →
A scene in The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien has three trolls bickering and quarrelling all night until the light of the dawn comes up and turns them into stone. Gandalf, the wise wizard, had unknowingly kept them arguing all night…. Continue Reading →
Language is the DNA of the mind. I have a mind. That I am pretty sure of. But how do I know that you, the reader, has a mind? How can I be sure that anyone except myself in this… Continue Reading →
Part 1 of this article is here. Language, Communication and Thought For the linguist, the opportunity to redefine the question of whether apes can be taught the rudiments of a language is perhaps a good chance for him to come… Continue Reading →
Language is one of the most precious elements we have. It is so precious that it has been the centrepiece of a struggle by various branches of the sciences to discover its origins and define it for many generations. The… Continue Reading →
If this sentence represents a theory of language evolution in the human species, then the full stop at the end represents the fossil records that we have on which the theory rests. It is no surprise that the Societe de… Continue Reading →
How much does language weigh? Can we measure its volume. The lack of answers to these fundamental questions should give us pause for thought as to its status in the universe.
Read the following sentence: Does the Andromeda Galaxy disappear after you finish reading this question? What is your answer? Some of you may say ‘yes’, many I expect will say ‘no’. Others might ask what is the ‘Andromeda Galaxy’? Well… Continue Reading →
RM
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