Malapropisms and the structure of the mental lexicon

Abstract

Two centuries ago, Sheridan invented the delightful character of Mrs. Malaprop, who had an unfailing ability to use the wrong word to the greatest effect.Since Sheridan, the malapropism has been a standard tool of comic writers, especially useful for indicating inferior intellectual ability of a speaker (as when Archie Bunker says "'We need a few laughs to break up the monogamy").But not all errors involving substitution of one word for another result from ignorance of the correct usage; on the contrary, inadvertent use of the wrong word is a common variety of speech error.'In this article we will examine such word substitution errors (which we will call malapropisms, although they do not arise, as Mrs. Malaprop's did, from ignorance); we will show that they reveal some interesting aspects of the structure of the mental dictionary used in producing and understanding speech.Consider a typical example of a malapropism:(1) T: If these two vectors are equivalent, then .E: If these two vectors are equivocal, then .Here the speaker has intended to say equivalent, but has inadvertently substituted for it equivocal.This error illustrates well the three major characteristics of malapropisms.First, the erroneous intrusion is a real word-not the intended word, of course, but not a meaningless string of phonemes either.Second, the target and error seem to be unrelated in meaning.Finally, there is a close relation between the pronunciation of the target and the pronunciation of the error.Before we analyze in more detail the properties of this kind of error, it would be * An earlier version of this article appeared in Texars Linguistic Fotum 1, March 1975.The authors wish to