Socio-cultural Impacts on Communication Slips

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Inter<strong>cultural</strong> Communication Studies XVII: 2 2008 Liu & Wang only linguistic studies, but to our understanding of their social and <strong>cultural</strong> implications as well. Studying the socio-<strong>cultural</strong> communication errors in a given language provides insight into the relationship between a speech error and the speaker’s social, <strong>cultural</strong> or political environment. After illustrating what slips lead to in our everyday lives, this paper compares speech errors in Chinese and English to show how language and <strong>cultural</strong> differences determine the types of errors that do (or do not) occur, and how induced/intended errors work to create artistic effect in <strong>cultural</strong> performances. Slips of the Mind and Tongue in Practical Life The study of communication slips has lent support to our understanding of linguistic theories, but it also has practical implications. People make slips in speech and other cognitive and physical activities. Such inadvertent errors have been related as causal factors in various accidents with serious consequences. For example, Reason (1982) analyzed several catastrophic accidents in which fatalities were apparently caused by slips of the mind. A London bus driver crashed a double-decker bus into a low overpass, killing six passengers, simply because he was in the habit of driving the same route in a single-decker bus. A senior pilot on the island of Tenerife failed to obtain clearance from the control tower before taking off and his Boeing 747 collided with a landing plane, killing 577 passengers and crew. The reason for this accident is believed to be that the pilot had just finished a different assignment involving hundreds of hours of training pilots in a cockpit simulator, in which runway clearance was not required. These fatal errors reflect how a highly habitual and automatic action can substitute for the correct one. Like inadvertent errors of the non-verbal kind, speech errors can also have social consequences. On August 31, 1995, ABC aired its regular TV program, America’s Funniest Home Videos. One of the video segments showed a graduation ceremony where the speaker, a professor at the school stunned the audience by congratulating the students on the achievement of their “tremendous amount of scholarship and tremendous amount of sex → success.” A slip like this may be accepted with understanding laughter from the audience (the speaker in fact won a prize by sending the videotaped tongue slip to the TV company), but other slips may face severe criticism. Slips of the tongue or pen in Chinese have also been found to attract unwanted attention. During the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), a Chinese calligrapher was allegedly punished for his “counter-revolutionary” behavior, simply because he slipped while brushpainting a very popular political slogan wishing Chairman Mao a long life. He accidentally replaced wan shou wu jiang (万寿无疆, a long life without limit) with the “counterrevolutionary” wu shou wu jiang (无寿无疆, no life without limit). In March 2000, a top Chinese legislator made a slip in his much noticed on-line work report. Turning the intended min fa dian (民法典 a civil code), into the erroneous min dian fa (民典法, a non-existent word). The media quickly responded by questioning the speaker’s working attitude and health, and by extension, his academic and administrative abilities as a senior legislator. Both verbal and non-verbal communication acts can be influenced by the anticipation and preservation of related experiences or linguistic items. Non-verbal behaviors are governed by 123
Inter<strong>cultural</strong> Communication Studies XVII: 2 2008 Liu & Wang the same mental controlling system that processes speech behavior. Any malfunctioning of this processing mechanism can lead to either slips of the mind (as in an accident) or slips of the tongue/pen. From today’s psycholinguistic point of view, these errors can be explained without involving any political reasoning. For example, when the Chinese calligrapher was writing the character wan (万), he was already anticipating the future character wu (无), resulting in the error. The verbal slip of the Chinese legislator is also caused this way. The context of his speech prior to the slip point contains a number of lexical items involving the word suffix fa (法, law), such as gongsi fa (公司法, corporation law), baoxian fa (保险法, insurance law), shangbiao fa (商标法, trademark law), zhuanli fa (专利法, patent law), hunyin fa (婚姻法, marriage law). Experiments in other languages (e.g., Japanese) have shown that such a frequency effect does indeed increase the chance of making errors of the slip-of-the-pen kind (Nihei, 1988; see also Kess & Miyamoto, 1994 for references). Nevertheless, speech errors by different speakers may reveal the storage of a speaker’s working lexicon. A slip like that made by the legislator is much less likely to occur in the speech of someone who never deals with law terms. This reminds us of the fact that some very common error types found in Chinese may never occur in English and vice versa. Slips and Language/Culture Differences Errors in English and Chinese may be classified into similar categories. Languagespecific and culture-specific characteristics, however, determine the differences between the two languages in terms of the likelihood of certain types of errors occurring rather than others. For example, word orders in Chinese topic-comment structures may follow more patterns than the largely SVO word order in English. Errors that involve consonant cluster and derivational segments are common in English, but are not in a language like Mandarin Chinese which allows no consonant cluster within a syllable. On the other hand, errors related to tones and logo-phonological features are typical among Chinese speakers, but are obviously not as likely in English. Structural differences may show that errors are more likely to be found in certain areas. For example, while it is unlikely or impossible that a Chinese speaker can make errors with structural elements such as the personal pronouns (e.g., he for she or it, me for I ), it is quite possible for an English speaker to make such errors. The following are a few examples from Fromkin (1973): 1. Laurie’s boyfriend has longer hair →…than he does than she does. 2. I told him (Peter) you were not coming. → I told her you were not coming in today. 3. The city has a personality of its own. → …of his own 4. I gave it to him. →….to he It is obvious that the underlined items in the above sentences are pronouns in different cause and gender, and they interfere with each other in the course of lexical retrieval. However, such errors are not likely to occur in Chinese, since all the third–person singular pronouns in any gender and case are associated with one and the same monosyllabic 124
Page 1: Intercultural Comm
Page 5 and 6: Intercultural Comm

Socio-cultural Impacts on Communication Slips

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?