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)
analyzed as a blend of "You'll have to talk to the guy who waters the
garden" and "You'll have to talk to the gardener". The following is a
somewhat isomorphic example in Chinese:
EX. 52. L6 ap + 5 3 .?,
"~'eige k3i siji de .. .' ("That driver..."; literally, "driver of the driver")
The word "siji" (3 fi, "driver"), seems to have substituted for the word
"ch8" (q, "car"), but it is also possible that the phrase is merely a blend of
the words "k3ich8deN (R mjtJ, "the one who drives the car"), and "siji"
(3
Substitution errors are often interesting examples of the phenomenon
of spreading activation, and often reveal aspects of the "semantic halo" of
associated concepts that surround each word. For example, the substitution
of "pliers" for "scissors" above is hardly a random intrusion; the concept of
"pliers" is clearly a close neighboring concept to that of "scissors". (This
issue is dealt with further below. See Aitchison, 1987, Dell & Reich, 1980,
and Hofstadter, 1985 for more on these ideas.)
2.7. Errors involving haplology (z i.)
The phenomenon of haplology involves the collapsing of two
successive words or phrases into one, invariably with some truncation or
loss of information at the point of union of the two elements:
Ex. 53. "Here's Mozart symphony number *twine... twen ty -nine."
Ex. 54. "If you're willing to go through some *momenterror... momentary
terror, you'll be okay."
This sort of process of "fusion" often occurs at a point where the two words
share a common phoneme, as in the last example, but this is by no means
always the case.
The following is a similar error in Chinese:
*kgng... hgn kgngng ch3ogub y> bzi y> ~giyu6n.' ("There's nothing to worry
about with the economy; if imports don't increase, the trade balance will
very likely be more than ten billion American dollars.")