Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese - Sino-Platonic Papers

David Moser, "Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese" Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 22 (March 1991 i
+$ g q.,,
"~inwdi shu6 shi BGi DB de d6u shi xi5 shi de pdngyoumen, me'iyzu ... b'u
yidlng y'ao shhrne, w'ei le sh6nme ... y8u sh6nme h~ngd'ongsng ... shand'ong ...
shand'ongxing de zh'e zh8ng ycci." ("Because saying all our friends at Peking
University are poets doesn't mean... I don't necessarily want to ... I don't
mean it to have some kind of sensational ... inflam ... inflammatory tone.")
(z
"~5ngd'ong' 3, "cause a sensation") and "sh3nd'ong" (G 3, "instigate,
stir up") are words with similar meanings, of course, and one can hear the
speaker floundering around trying to decide on the most appropriate word
choice. No doubt other competing words were active, but did not appear in
the utterance itself. In a slightly more hurried or flustered context, this
indecision might have resulted in the same kind of blend seen in some of
the examples above.
2.5. Exchanges (a iz)
Exchanges involve the swapping of two phonemes or words, usually
but not always within the same phonemic clause. For example:
Ex. 44. "Imagine owning a *bet pat." (pet bat)
Ex. 45. "He's crying because he just slammed his door in the finger." (his
finger in the door)
Ex. 46. "Did you remember to bike your lock?" (lock your bike)
In errors involving the exchange of two whole words, the two words are
almost always of the same word-class, i.e., nouns swap with nouns, verbs
with verbs, etc. (Hotopf, 1980, Nooteboom, 1973). The last example seems
to be an exception to this, but note that both "bike" and "lock" can be either
a noun or a verb, and this is what enables the utterance to slip past the
syntactic editors involved in speech production.
My examples in Chinese seem to adhere to this principle of invariant
word-class as well:
EX. 470 ''3 % 1 Em"
"Shii z\ai by shang ne." ("The book is on the pen.")
Where what was meant was "BY 2ai shnshang" (% 3 1,
"The pen is on
the book"). and 3 are both nouns, of course. Exchanges involving