Malapropism In Verbal Communication

Malapropism is the immortalized form of malapropos (adjective or adverb) meaning"inappropriate"or"inappropriately", which is derived from French. Initially, malapropism as one kind of writing technique was applied by many writers in their works to create hilarious effect. Later, however, malapropism was first introduced in the field of linguistics by Lord Byron thus rapidly drew attention of more linguists. In China, scholars accent its rhetoricalal functions, especially in the field of literature, from the aspects of origin, translation and meaning, etc. Additionally, they compare malapropism with a traditional Chinese rhetorical device—"fei bai"—in both English and Chinese literature. By contrast, foreign scholars, especially those linguists, show great interest in malapropism from a linguistic perspective and examine malapropism as one sub-class of speech errors. According to the classification of speech errors, malapropism belongs to word substitution; however, it sharply distinguishes itself from other types of word substitution in the way that the"error word"and"target word"share many similar linguistic features other than their differences, for instance, they are in the same grammatical category, they are sound-similar or form-similar to each other, etc, moreover, the"error word"is a real existing word with meaning. Due to all these special linguistic features of malapropism, a large number of linguists pay great attention to it. Since the 1960s, as psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics boomed, speech errors have been increasingly studied from the aspects of cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. Malapropism as one special type of speech errors is of vital significance and well worth investigating.In the light of what has been achieved in studies on malapropism by foreign scholars, this thesis endeavors to explicate the phenomenon of malapropism in verbal communication based on connectionist models, especially parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (which is the typical type of connectionist models), in order to provide a new perspective for home studies which have been relatively restricted within the field of literature. Therefore, this thesis selects"malapropism"that frequently occurs during verbal communication from the perspective of semantic priming and employs theory of PDP models to elucidate how speakers produce error words, then tries to elucidate how listeners understand these error words which guarantee the success of the communication. To understand the causes of malapropism in verbal communication can help language learners, especially those foreign language learners memorize and master words more effectively. Therefore, several approaches of lexical learning have been explicated based on the research findings in order to provide some constructive suggestions for language acquisition and vocabulary teaching.This thesis is organized in the following way: Chapter 1 presents the research rationale, questions, targets, significance and the thesis layout as well; Chapter 2 is the literature review part, which introduces the historical background of studies on malapropisms both at home and abroad, with emphasis on the studies abroad that are crucially relevant to the present topic; Chapter 3 demonstrates the theoretical foundations of major semantic priming models, and highlights the superiority of connectionist models in explicating malapropisms; Chapter 4 attempts to explicate the production (by speakers) and comprehension (by listeners) of malapropisms with the approach of connectionist models, especially PDP models, which occur in daily verbal communication; Chapter 5 takes the findings of Chapter 4 as a basis to provide the application of malapropisms in lexical learning or acquisition. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with major findings, limitations of the thesis, and some suggestions for further study.