what's in a whole nother error?

so, in my last post, i discussed the two definitions of error: grammatical or usage error ('spicket' for 'spigot') and technical speech errors ('cattleships and bruisers' for 'battleships and cruisers'). i'd like to address another, somewhat related, error issue that sprung from my thesis project on typos.

speech errors follow very predictable patterns. they are totally constrained by certain rules such as 'vowels only slip with vowels' and 'speech errors only produce valid syllables.' that is, 'bad' would never slip and become 'abd' because this involves a consonant/vowel swap and produces a sound combination, 'bd,' that doesn't occur in english.

clearly, typos don't obey these rules. the common typo the-->hte is a good example. 'ht' is not a valid word beginning, and yet this typo occurs all the time. most of the typos that violate the rules of speech errors have pretty clear motivations. 'hte' involves switching two adjacent letters. 'tghis' involves accidentally hitting a key next to the intended one. but in my thesis, i found a lot of typos that seem unmotivated by physical factors of the keyboard. for instance, someone substituted a 'b' for a 'p' and one typed 'soom bo-' when they meant to type 'some books.'

similarity of units has always been acknowledged as a factor in speech errors. each speech sound has a set of features (place of articulation in the mouth, manner of articulation, and whether or not the vocal chords are vibrating), and the more features two sounds share, the more likely they are to slip with one another. 'b' for 'p' makes sense as a speech error because the two sounds share every feature except voicing. but as a typo, it's hard to understand because the two letters are so far apart on the keyboard.

so it seems that there are some typos that obey the speech error constraints and are based on phonetic similarity. but some are based only on motoric or articulatory similarity. this has a couple of implications, i believe.

first, it seems to indicate that we do use inner speech when we type. the sounds of language play a role in the way we plan our typing, which doesn't involve sound in any other way. second, it means that we're able to separate articulatory features from phonetic features. this makes the comparison to speech kind of tricky, because in speech, the notions of articulatory and phonological similarity are the same. that is, phonological similarity is based on the physical characteristics of a particular medium--the human mouth we all share. it's as much an historical accident as they layout of the keyboard!

AND i have a completely unfounded theory! another thing happens in speech because of articulatory factors: transformations in quick speech. these are things like 'did you eat?' becoming 'jeet?' linguists don't consider these errors, in part because they're very predictable. so what if these kinds of abbreviations--which, remember, occur because of fast articulation--were analogous to articulatory errors (those caused by the layout of the keyboard) in typing? these kind of errors are, almost certainly, more common in fast typing and, if collapses aren't counted as errors, typing errors vastly outnumber speech errors. i'm not saying the numbers shold match perfectly, but the difference in frequency i found was really huge, and when i compared speech errors only to speech-error like typos, the numbers were quite similar. (sorry i'm being too lazy to actually haul out my thesis and give you the exact numbers. i'll send you a copy if you want one.)

i think the only real difference between articlatory laziness in speech and typing errors is that the former is completely expected. it's only in recent years that typing has become a real-time communications medium, and i would guess that we'll start to see more of these typos going uncorrected. i've certainly noticed that i tend to not correct them in informal im conversations, especially if they're fairly predictable and don't disrupt interpretation, like how-->hwo.

it's also interesting to note that almost all the definitions of error that we've encountered involve accidental violation of the speaker's intention. and these articulatory foibles certainly fit that bill. few people would think they meant to say 'jew eat?' or 'jeet?' rather than 'did you eat?' but we all do it the same way we all occasionally, predictably type 'teh.'

Common Errors in English

I'm too slow on my defense of a radicalized gaming agenda, but I found a website today that works hard to fight any sort of radicalized linguistic agenda.

I give you:

Common Errors in English

It is a compilation of "errors" in the English language. It is quite impressive, covering everything from the use of "spicket" to mean "spigot" to the alleged redundancy of "cheese quesadilla."

This raises a question for me, though: isn't it a contradiction for something to be a common linguistic error? Paul Brians, the creator of the site (and the book it's based off of) is not ignorant of the point, and presents his work in a particular, practical context:

What is an error in English?
The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

But isn’t one person’s mistake another’s standard usage?
Often enough, but if your standard usage causes other people to consider you stupid or ignorant, you may want to consider changing it. You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to, rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.

What do we think about this? Paul Brians seems innocent enough. But how should we deal with the problem of language standardization in general? I once heard a great definition of a speech error, which was simply a speech act that doesn't have the effects that it was intended to have. If that's the case, the Brians' catalogue would be appropriately named--he is not universally prescribing a usage as "true" to the language, but rather providing a kind of instrumental prescription: "To not be laughed at, don't say 'spicket.'"

Perhaps this awareness of the scope of the prescription is all that's needed in linguistic education to make it less insidious. If language is taught not as "correct" or "incorrect" but rather as "(in the present context) effective" and "(in the present context) ineffective)", politicization of speech 'errors' (with its racist and classist effects) might not make as much sense to anybody.

On the other hand, linguistic competence seems to be such a basic faculty, I have doubts that conscious realization of the contingency of linguistic 'rules' will do much to stop the automatic perception of those that make 'errors' as being ignorant of some True Way Things Are.

But on a third hand--is incompetence withing the scope of the present linguistic conditions any better than a kind of ignorance of some (perceived as) universalized facts about language? Maybe speech errors ought to be looked down on, if only as a way of providing an incentive for people to get up to speed.

usage-based douging

one of my main complaints with formal stystems of syntax and semantics is that, if and when they acknowledge the importance of meaning in usage, they treat it as a concrete and knowable object. for instance, in my syntax class, we learned that a word is (presumably this means 'is stored in the brain as') an ordered triple, , consisting of x, the sound of the word; y, the syntactic category of the word (is it a noun, a mass noun, a verb? does it require a direct object?); and z, the meaning of the word and its logical relationship to other words.

this approach creates some fairly obvious problems, especially if one rejects chomsky's competence/performance distinction and acknowledges that people have disputes and confusion about what words mean all the time.

a great example (and a hilarious invented usage!) is the verb 'to doug,' which has been widely circulated in my co-ed house here at brown. it's a humorous adaptation of existing linguistic material (namely Doug's name), and I think it orginated in the passive form: "you've been douged!".

i don't provide the definition or the exact origin story because these are both somewhat disputed. there are at least two origin stories floating around (and I personally believe the meaning may have been added as an afterthought to the utterance anyway). this is a pretty common case in normal language, too. consider all the idioms we use daily without knowing their origins (let the cat out of the bag? what!?). in addition, there are certain fine points of usage that people don't agree on. for example, can only Doug doug? does douging have to be an unintentional act? and so on.

now, for all this fuzziness and lack of formal definition, there are some amazing consistencies in the usage of 'to doug.' i presented some house members with fill-in-the-blank sentences, and their answers were very elucidating. for instance:

"He ____ her too often for comfort."
- dougs, douged
"Tom ate all of Dick's food without realizing it was Dick's, though he knew it was not what he, Tom, had ordered. What a prototypical _____!"
- douging
"In fact, Tom engages in ____ almost daily!"
- douging, dougage, douggery

so, how can we account for both the inconsistencies and the consistencies with one theory? should we, like chomsky, ignore the 'anomalous' utterances that don't fit with our rigid structural categorization of 'to doug'? should we declare speakers who don't know the 'real' meaning incompetent, and imagine a perfect, ideal speaker who has a perfect representation of the meaning of 'to doug' in her head? how can such a 'real' meaning exist for a word that was made up mere months ago?

this is why usage-based theories of grammar are so freakin' sweet! if we appeal to actual observable facts about usage, a lot of these issues fall out very neatly indeed.

a word's meaning is a function of the way we (average speakers!) use the word. scratch that--everything (syntax, spelling, pronunciation, meaning) are functions of usage!

that is, i heard a friend say 'you've been douged!', and because i am a native english speaker with experience with sentence frames like this, i knew 'doug'--regardless of its meaning--must be a verb that can take a direct object. then i saw a friend's t-shirt (this is a real thing), that says 'See Doug. See Doug doug. Doug Doug, doug!' and understood that 'to doug' is a regular verb just like the other verbs i've seen in that type of sentence my whole life. then, i heard a friend say 'i'm going to doug you!' and another friend say 'you can't--if it's intentional, it's not douging,' and i understood something new about the meaning of 'to doug' and the appropriate contexts for its use. on the back of the aforementioned t-shirt, it says 'you've been douged!', so i assume the past perfect (or whatever) form of the verb is spelled with one 'g.' enough counter-examples, or a counter-example from a particularly reputable source, might lead me to change this mental representation, though. (at this time, the t-shirt is the most reputable source available.)

when we learn a new word, we don't learn it all at once as an ordered triple, and its meaning isn't necessarily part of the original package. what we learn about words is ways that they might be used. these ways include syntactic and phonetic contexts as well as real-world contexts including socio-linguistic factors like social acceptability, formality levels, and so on. meaning falls out as a result of contextualized usage. we can explicitly define the word, as is done in dictionaries, but this is a) not necessary (as in the case of douging) and b) it still constitutes a particular type of context. we never--NEVER EVER--encounter words without a context that tells us something about their acceptability!

usage-based theories can empirically use statistical distributions to explain certain facts about language. for instance, the mass noun form of the word, 'douggery' or 'dougage', is not exactly disputed, but it's generally not that well known. this might be because it's very infrequent. we would expect this form to be less stable, less well-defined and more prone to change over time, because speakers have a weak representation of it in their brains. they haven't stored up enough examples to know how to use it properly in all situations. the phrase 'you've been douged', however, occurs very commonly and is therefore unlikely to be changed or used differently. spelling is another good example--there aren't enough instances of the written word yet to know whether one 'g' or two is more acceptable.

people can and do make mistakes in language. this is how language changes, and why we are sometimes not understood. usage-based grammar can explain both our competencies and our incompetencies using a very simple apparatus: we store and compare each example of a word we encounter. in addition, it explains our messing-up without appealing to a hard and fast prescriptive distinction between right and wrong. instead, different tokens of the same word are simply more or less acceptable.

an invented usage like 'to doug' is a great example because of its unsolidified state, but in some ways it's just like any other word; the same arguments i've made here can be applied to all language in general. now, go out there and try not to doug one another!