[net.nlang] 'Verbal shortmouth'

zrm@mit-eddie.UUCP (Zigurd R. Mednieks) (11/26/83)

It's too bad that the phrase "verbal shortmouth" is becoming a part of
shop talk here. I thought it would do better with the following
definition: 

	An obscene phone call having mainly to do with the role of oral
	sex in pederasty.

Oh well, back to the gutter with me.

Cheers,
Zig

zrm@mit-eddie.UUCP (11/26/83)

References: <4073@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Relay-Version:version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site duke.UUCP
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Path:duke!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!zrm
Message-ID:<961@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date:Fri, 25-Nov-83 21:55:25 EST
Organization:MIT, Cambridge, MA

It's too bad that the phrase "verbal shortmouth" is becoming a part of
shop talk here. I thought it would do better with the following
definition:

	An obscene phone call having mainly to do with the role of oral
	sex in pederasty.

Oh well, back to the gutter with me.

Cheers,
Zig

marcel@uiucdcs.UUCP (marcel ) (11/29/83)

#R:dciem:-47300:uiucdcs:19000030:000:214
uiucdcs!marcel    Nov 28 14:04:00 1983

Another paper on the same issue is

	D.A. Norman, "A psychologist views human processing: human errors
		and other phenomena suggest processing mechanisms", Proc
		7th IJCAI (1981), 1097 ff.

					Marcel Schoppers

donn@sdchema.UUCP (12/02/83)

Joe Stemberger was a good friend of mine while we were both graduate
students at UCSD Linguistics.  He got his PhD and has become published
and respected while I settled for a Master's and have remained comfortably
obscure...  But we still keep in touch and when I saw Rick Dinitz's
article I forwarded it to him and asked if he had anything that might
be interesting to the net (and might raise the quality of the
discussion at least slightly).  Here is his response:

	I have received one forwarded message from the discussion
	about speech errors and a few second-hand comments on the
	discussion.  Here's some input based on this somewhat scanty
	information.  I am the person mentioned in Rick Dinitz's
	message of a few days ago.  My name is Joe Stemberger, in the
	psych department at C-MU (stemberger%cmu-psy-a@cmu-cs-a), and I
	have done a lot of work on speech errors, including collecting
	7100 of the things and doing my dissertation on them.

	I gather that there was a question about errors like IT'S A
	VAST CAR for VERY FAST CAR, where the two words VERY and FAST
	have been telescoped into a single form.  These aren't all that
	common as far as errors go, but they are well known in the
	literature on speech errors.  Vicky Fromkin (in her 1973 book
	on SPEECH ERRORS AS LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE) refers to them as
	"haplology errors" because the speaker drops one or more
	syllables in saying the words involved.  Lecours and Lhermitte,
	in a discussion of similar errors in aphasia, use the more
	colorful term "telescopage errors".  Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel
	calls them "sequential blends", because the two adjacent words
	have been blended into a single form.  There is another type of
	error called a "blend" that involves the blending of two
	usually synonymous words, as in FLASTE, a blend of FLAVOR and
	TASTE.  Stefanie shows that blends and sequential blends have a
	lot of the same characteristics.  I have recently discovered
	that almost all known examples of sequential blends involve an
	adverb modifying an adjective or verb, an adjective modifying a
	noun, or two nouns either in a compound noun or in a coordinate
	noun phrase.  I suspect that they result from a failure on the
	part of the speaker to create a position in the sentence for
	one of these modifiers or extra nouns.  The word that is left
	without a position usually just doesn't show up at all, but
	occasionally it succeeds in partially getting produced by
	blending together with the word it modifies or with the other
	noun in the phrase.  That, at any rate, is my current
	understanding of this type of error.

	If you have any other questions about speech errors, just ask.

	---Joe Stemberger

Donn Seeley    UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF    ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn