Slips of the Tongue in George W.Bush’s Discourse

The high number of substitutions in Bush’s discourse indicates that linguistic units are substituted by the same parts of speech, meaning that either he is thinking about something different from what he is talking about (taking into account the relation with Freud, when referring to slips, meaning that people say what they really think about) or the stress level increases the incorrect choice of lexical items, and it results in a wrong winner of the ‘competition’.
In conclusion, word access mechanism and language processing mechanisms discussed in the essay are useful in understanding the way the brain works, and they are particularly essential in analyzing slips of the tongue. They allow understanding at which stage speech errors occur and why do people think about one thing, but pronounce the other. In the essay, methods of collecting slips of the tongue were discussed, and the analysis of their types in George W. Bush’s discourse, according to Carroll’s classification, was performed. The results of the analysis showed that the most popular type of slip of the tongue in Bush’s discourse is substitution, during which he substitutes planned words with words belonging to the same part of speech. Such substitutions mainly leave an impression of illogical utterance, which is often funny. Moreover, it was determined that either the person under analysis is thinking parallel thoughts, while he is talking, or the stress level decreases the ability to produce correctly shaped lexical items. All in all, slip of the tongue is an interesting and entertaining phenomenon to investigate.
…