Some Attentions
I was talking to a friend of mine one day when we were having lunch at seacobeck. He was complaining that there were no more forks, and I wanted to tell him to ask someone at the counter for one. He was standing up on the other side of the table from me and as I was giving this advice, someone he knew was behind him trying to get his attention. I felt rushed and the beginning of my advice came out as “Get one of their attentions and…” I knew before I said it that this sentence wasn’t quite right, and I even knew why and almost decided to stop and repair it but since I felt rushed, I didn’t.
I think that this was a case of me pulling up a sentence frame and then realizing that the words I wanted to use didn’t quite fit right into it. If I hadn’t been so hurried to get a sentence out, I would have stopped and changed my sentence frame–creating a disfluency rather than an error.
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ooohh…this is something we didn’t cover much this semester, but I think it’s a classic case of semantic number intervening! Let’s take a parallel case, with a different noun, like “Get one of their ideas…” and you’ll see that a plural noun is completely appropriate. The reason this seemed strange to you is that “attention” is usually a mass noun, which means that it can’t be pluralized (except in a limited range of meanings, like romantic attentions).
Basically, you ended up pluralizing a mass noun because of conceptual number – each person had attention to give, and because the syntactic frame would normally allow a plural noun in that place!
I’m still unable to post my own entries as an author…. so I am going to post here, as I can only comment.
My favorite speech error came when I made a really funny word substitution with a friend of mine. We were watching TV, and saw the rapper 50 Cent on the screen. We began talking about whether or not 50 Cent was washed up, or if he had gotten better since his hit “In Da Club,” which both my friend and I fondly remembered from highschool. My friend asked me, “What was the name of that cd again?,” to which my reply was “Get Rich or Die Crying.” I immediately laughed—I had meant to say “Get Rich or Die Trying,” but had made the substitution that evoked a funny image (in my mind) of 50 Cent weeping with a gun in his hand.
This was an example of a word substitution that had both semantic and phonological influences. I think that, since my general knowledge of 50 Cent causes semantic activations of words related to violence, and since I was primed by the word “die,” that these semantic influences helped spur my substitution. Since “trying” and “crying” are both extremely phonologically similar, with only the difference of the initial stop phoneme, this may have affected my substitution.
Another error Post:
On a recent trip to Sonic (the fast-food drive thru), my friend and I each produced speech errors while ordering our snacks. The first error, that mad me laugh extensively simply because it sounded so funny, was when my friend said “Can I have a Butterfingle Blast please?” He didn’t bother to correct his error to the person on the intercom, but immediately looked sheepishly towards me as I began to giggle and repeat “Butterfingle Blast! Ha!” He had been attempting to order a “Butterfinger Blast,” but made a sound anticipation error, by anticipating the /l/ sound of “blast” and producing it instead at the end of the preceding word “Butterfinger,” creating the funny word “Butterfingle.”
The second error that was made at the infamous Butterfingle Sonic Trip was my own. When attempting to order a “Lemon Berry Real Fruit Slush,” I instead said “Lemon Berry Real Fluit Slush.” This is another example of a sound anticipation, as I was anticipating the /l/ from the initial consonant cluster /sl/ early, producing it in the initial consonant cluster of “fruit” by replacing the /r/ with /l/, creating “fluit.” The sounds “l/ and /r/ are both liquids, and since phonologies are similar, it is easy to substitute these phonemes for one another. This error has tripped me up more than once while ordering the “Lemon Berry Real Fruit Slush.”
Kathryn,
That last error exchange is a great example of what we like to call “prescriptivist retribution”, which says that if you laugh at someone’s error (or correct it), then you make the same mistake yourself!