In The Sophist, Plato describes a dialog between Socrates and Theaetetus whose subject is how nam... more In The Sophist, Plato describes a dialog between Socrates and Theaetetus whose subject is how names and verbs combine to form sentences. Plato"s conclusion is that putting together a name with a verb, which he also calls the weaving together of terms, is what makes a sentence different from a list. In the tradition of analytic philosophy, this questionwhat makes a sentence -is known sometimes as "the unity of the proposition" while elsewhere it is called "the unity of the sentence." For the sake of this paper, these phrases are speaking of the same question and I intend to give, not an account of how this is done, but a direction to begin looking for that
The scientific use of slips of the tongue began in Vienna in the late 1890s when Sigmund Freud an... more The scientific use of slips of the tongue began in Vienna in the late 1890s when Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Meringer began collecting and analyzing them. Since Freud used speech errors to psychoanalyze his patients, the efficacy and results of his work with slips of the tongue is beyond the scope of this paper, but Meringer was more interested in what these mistakes could reveal about language. Meringer and Carl Mayer (a neurologist) collected 8,800 speech blunders and published them in a book entitled Versprechen und Verlesen (Mispeaking and Misreading) in 1895. Meringer was also the first person to classify these slips, contributing the names "anticipation" and "perserveration" which are still in use by linguists today (Erard, 41). An anticipation is when a later linguistic element takes the place of an earlier one, such as "lack of lamb" for "rack of lamb," while a preserveration is the reverse. (The term "preserveration" also appears as "preservation" in some texts, including Victoria Fromkin's Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence.) Linguists such as Fromkin followed Meringer's work in using these slips to posit models of how the brain processed language. With the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging, psycholinguists and cognitive neurologists have begun the process of using speech errors to identify brain regions responsible for these slips. The subjects of their studies are often people with brain injury, although not always. Discovering which brain segment is responsible for a specific part of the process of speech production or comprehension could lead to the development of technology to enhance these segments, benefitting those with brain injuries. The results of these studies also help reinforce or modify proposed models of the how the brain processes language.
In The Sophist, Plato describes a dialog between Socrates and Theaetetus whose subject is how nam... more In The Sophist, Plato describes a dialog between Socrates and Theaetetus whose subject is how names and verbs combine to form sentences. Plato"s conclusion is that putting together a name with a verb, which he also calls the weaving together of terms, is what makes a sentence different from a list. In the tradition of analytic philosophy, this questionwhat makes a sentence -is known sometimes as "the unity of the proposition" while elsewhere it is called "the unity of the sentence." For the sake of this paper, these phrases are speaking of the same question and I intend to give, not an account of how this is done, but a direction to begin looking for that
The scientific use of slips of the tongue began in Vienna in the late 1890s when Sigmund Freud an... more The scientific use of slips of the tongue began in Vienna in the late 1890s when Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Meringer began collecting and analyzing them. Since Freud used speech errors to psychoanalyze his patients, the efficacy and results of his work with slips of the tongue is beyond the scope of this paper, but Meringer was more interested in what these mistakes could reveal about language. Meringer and Carl Mayer (a neurologist) collected 8,800 speech blunders and published them in a book entitled Versprechen und Verlesen (Mispeaking and Misreading) in 1895. Meringer was also the first person to classify these slips, contributing the names "anticipation" and "perserveration" which are still in use by linguists today (Erard, 41). An anticipation is when a later linguistic element takes the place of an earlier one, such as "lack of lamb" for "rack of lamb," while a preserveration is the reverse. (The term "preserveration" also appears as "preservation" in some texts, including Victoria Fromkin's Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence.) Linguists such as Fromkin followed Meringer's work in using these slips to posit models of how the brain processed language. With the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging, psycholinguists and cognitive neurologists have begun the process of using speech errors to identify brain regions responsible for these slips. The subjects of their studies are often people with brain injury, although not always. Discovering which brain segment is responsible for a specific part of the process of speech production or comprehension could lead to the development of technology to enhance these segments, benefitting those with brain injuries. The results of these studies also help reinforce or modify proposed models of the how the brain processes language.
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