A Study Of Slips Of The Tongue In Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation investigates the slips of the tongue in Mandarin Chinese discourse. The study of this kind of speech errors lies in the domain of psycholinguistics, with the aim of discovering the mechanism of language production, including mental representation and mental process. There are altogether nine chapters.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the remaining chapters. It summarizes and reviews past and current study, and explains the sources of data, the method of data collection, and the emphasis of this study. Used in this study are two kinds of data, the SH data and the J data. The former consists of 1063 items of tongue slips collected by Shen Jiaxuan and recorded whenever an error is noticed in everyday life, and the latter 650 items collected by this author by listening to regular recordings of radio and TV talk. The main purpose of this research is to verify various linguistic theories about the Chinese language and their psychological reality through a careful analysis of the tongue slips. The emphasis is laid on those issues that are most controversial in Chinese linguistics.Chapter 2 is a classification of the tongue slips in two dimensions. One dimension is the formal characteristics and the other the size of the language units. In the first dimension the tongue slips are divided into ten different types, and they are called anticipation, perseveration, exchange, shift, blends, coordination, haplology, substitution, and omission respectively. In the second dimension we first have a division between phonetic errors and errors with meaningful units. The phonetic units include distinctive features, phonemes, phoneme combinations, and syllables, and the meaningful units include morphemes, words, and phrases. Several principles are established to deal with various ambiguous situations in classification.Chapter 3 discusses tongue slips related to the phonetic distinctive features. The analysis leads to the conclusion that errors do occur at the level of DFs, which constitutes a level of mental representation. As far as the syllable initials areconcerned, we found several DFs often involved in tongue slips, among which [+ aspirate] is subject to error most easily, followed by [idifruse] and [県igh]. It is also found that [+aspirate] can easily replace [-aspirate] but not replaced by it.Chapter 4 discusses tone errors. So far, linguists have not agreed on the status of tone in the syllable structure of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to the viewpoint that the tone is dependent on the segments of the syllable, our analysis of tongue slips proves that the tone is independent of the syllable and can move like segments. However, its mobility is not as strong as that of the segments. Consequently, the conclusion is that there are more differences than similarities between English stresses and Chinese tones. On one hand, tones function to differentiate meaning, and this function is not very different from the function of segments, but on the other hand, with a weaker mobility tones share some characteristics with the suprasegmentals, and are thus similar to English stresses. In other words, the status of the tone is somewhere between the suprasegmentals and the segments, but closer to the segments. About tone processing steps, we have two findings. One is that in producing Chinese syllables the value of the neutralized tone is fixed after the value of the preceding non-neutralized tone. The other is that the tone sandhi rules are implemented following the step of tone spelling-out.Chapter 5 treats the syllable branching structure and the status of the head vowel. In general, tongue slips occur in the same positions within the syllable, and this "homology" principle decides that the syllable branching structure is part of the articulation plan, because it stipulates which segment or segment combination in a syllable can or cannot move. For the syllable branching structure in Mandarin Chinese, our data analysis once again shows that "the initial and final analysis" and "the consonant and vowel analy...