Jean Aitchison Posts
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At one time, it was assumed that children had some basic inbuilt spatial concepts such as up versus down, in versus out, front versus back, and so on. But this is turning out to be unlikely. Instead, children quickly learn about the spatial categories adopted by their own language.
Sometimes two items are intentionally blended together in order to create a new word. Lewis Carroll makes Humpty Dumpty explain in Alice Through the Looking Glass that SLITHY means ‘lithe and slimy’, commenting, ‘You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’ – though Lewis Carroll’s made-up words may not be as intentional as they appear. Apparently, he suffered from severe migraine attacks, and many of his strange neologisms are uncannily like the kind of temporary aphasia produced by some migraine sufferers.
Perhaps better examples of intentional blends are SMOG from ‘smoke and fog’, and BRUNCH from ‘breakfast and lunch’. Occasional parallels of this type can be spotted between slips of the tongue and language change.
Meanwhile, repetitions are relatively unusual among normal people, because they mostly have a very effective ‘wipe the slate clean’ mechanism. As soon as they have uttered a word, the phonetic form no longer remains to clutter up the mind. But aphasics, often to their frustration and despair, keep repeating sounds and words from the sentence before.
Aphasia is rather different from slips of the tongue, in that it is far from ‘normal’. The name aphasia comes from a Greek word which means literally ‘without speech’, though is widely used in both the UK and USA to mean ‘impaired speech’.
Aphasia covers an enormous range of speech problems. At one end of the range we find people who can only say a single word such as O DEAR, O DEAR, O DEAR, or more usually, a swear word such as DAMN, DAMN, DAMN. One unproved theory is that people who have had a severe stroke sometimes find their speech ‘petrified’ into the word they were uttering as the stroke occurred. At the other end of the scale are people with only occasional wordfinding difficulties – it is not always clear where true aphasia ends and normal slips of the tongue begin.
Hesitation pauses are more promising. There are more of them and they do not have any obvious physical purpose comparable to that of filling one’s lungs with air. Normally they account for one-third to one-half of the time taken up in talking. Speech in which such pausing does not occur is sometimes referred to as ‘inferior’ speech. Either it has been rehearsed beforehand, or the speaker is merely stringing together a number of standard phrases she habitually repeats.
Unfortunately, we tend to over-value fluent, glib speakers who may not be thinking what they are saying, and often condemn a hesitant or stammering speaker who may be thinking very hard.