A Pragmatic Research On Speech Errors

This thesis takes speech errors as the main research object, systematically and comprehensively dealing with the five aspects of speech errors, namely, speech errors and its main types, causes and perlocutionary acts of speech errors, responses of hearer to speech errors, comparative analysis of speech errors and banter and explanatory power of Conceptual Blending Theory to speech errors from the pragmatic angle.Simply speaking, speech errors refer to the unsuccessful speech in normal oral communication. They can be classified into seven types: pauses, repeats, false starts, corrections, interjections, stutters and slips of the tongue. Among them, a slip of the tongue is an important type of speech errors and it can be divided into eight types, namely, anticipations, perseverations, addition, deletion, reversals, substitutions, blends and shifts. In addition, analyzed from syntactic aspect, a speech error only has one deep structure, but has many surface structures. Therefore, a speech error has many manifestations. Pragmatic error is also an important kind of speech errors, especially in the intercultural communication.The causes of speech errors can be analyzed from different aspects, including internal causes and external causes. There are two kinds of internal causes: physiological causes and psychological causes. The external causes of speech errors mainly include cognitive, social and cultural factors. What's more, speech errors can produce two kinds of perlocutionary acts: positive and negative effects. The former includes producing an effect of humor, making the atmosphere lively and relieving the conflict; while the latter includes producing ambiguity and causing misunderstanding. Having known these perlocutionary acts, we can understand and explain speech errors much better.Facing the speech errors that the speaker makes, the hearer will have different responses in different situations. Usually speaking, there are two situations and three kinds of responses in each situation. First, if the hearer understands the speaker's speech errors: (a) he may keep silent, which may influence the communication process; (b) he may correct it directly, which may make an atmosphere of humor or lead to conflict; (c) he may ridicule the speaker's error, which is possible to make an easy atmosphere or cause communication conflict. Second, if the hearer doesn't understand speaker's speech errors: (a) he may choose to keep silent, which will influence the normal communication; (b) he may correct it indirectly to guarantee the smooth communication; (c) he may misunderstand the original intention of the speaker, which will influence the communication seriously.Speech errors and banter are both common language phenomena and they have many common and different points. Analyzed from the politeness aspect, speech errors and banter are both communicative means and they have restrictions to use. The difference is that speech errors can not be controlled by the speaker, since he is likely to make speech errors unconsciously; but banter can be controlled by the speaker and he often applies banter to improve the relationship with his friends or families. Analyzed from the communication effect aspect, both speech errors and banter can produce humor effect, which can entertain the hearer, but speech errors may have ambiguity and cause misunderstanding, while banter seldom produces such effects. Although speech errors and banter are two different kinds of language phenomena, they have a close relationship. On one hand, when the speech errors can produce humor and it is a kind of impolite speech, it can be regarded as a kind of banter. On the other hand, an inappropriate banter is also a kind of speech errors.For theory explanation of speech errors, the author thinks that Conceptual Blending Theory can be applied. According to Conceptual Blending Theory, blending can occur in various language levels, such as vocabulary level, phrase level, sentence level and speech level, and it has been successfully used to explain many language phenomena up to now. The author thinks that Conceptual Blending Theory has a broad explanatory power and it can be also used to explain speech errors. Through conceptual blending process, we can recognize whether the speech is a speech error or not, and then we can carry out many corresponding means to guarantee the successful communication.