Speech errors (slips of the tongue) often ‘borrow’ from language in the mind that is downstream of the target language. Here is a good example from Theresa May at PMQs.
Continue reading “Slip of the Tongue: Borrowing from downstream”
Prime Minister’s questions (PMQs) got a ‘whooo!’ of surprise today when Jeremy Corbyn was speaking at the dispatch box.
One way to put a politician on the spot is to ask them how many people have been affected by their policy. Three times seems to be the optimum number of times to ask according to the Andrew Marr’s rulebook as he interviewed Theresa May on Sunday.
Slips of the tongue can be annoying for interviewers when they happen once. But when one error leads into another and then another, all in the space of a few words, it can be triply frustrating.
Vince Cable should perhaps leave sexual innuendos to others after fluffing his lines at the Liberal Democrats’ conference on Tuesday. Cable had intended to say that the Tories were locked in an ‘erotic spasm’ over Brexit, but instead the words came out as ‘exotic spresm’ producing an interesting slip.
Phoneme insertion in line 01.
Slips of the tongue that involve word substitution always seem to get the biggest laughs. Here Jeremy Hunt, the new Foreign Secretary, mistakenly refers to his wife as Japanese when she is in fact Chinese. The humour in this slip was obvious to the audience of Chinese dignitaries during a visit by Hunt to Beijing to discuss post-Brexit trade talks.
Standing up and speaking in public is not just a one-way affair from speaker to audience. The reaction of the audience to what is said can be just as important and defining as the speaker’s words themselves.
“This is the most expensive round of golf in history.”
Conversation can sometimes be like a game of poker, raising and doubling stakes, as the Andrew Marr Show demonstrated on Sunday.
Sally Who? You don’t get a name like that unless you work for the BBC!
“You wait forever for a bus question at PMQs, and then seven come along at once.”
An interesting slip of the tongue by Theresa May at Prime Minister’s question time occurred on Wednesday and suggested that perhaps we had voted for rather more than we thought during the EU referendum in 2016!
It seems strange that two of the smallest and most commonest words in the English dictionary could cause confusion between interviewer and interviewee but that is what ‘a’ and ‘the’ seemed to do on Sunday when Andrew Marr interviewed James Brokenshire, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, on the BBC.
Richard Madeley knows when to shut down an interview. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he abruptly brought his interview with Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, to an end when Williamson refused to answer his question after four strikes.
Prime Minister’s question time (PMQs) is known for lengthy questions and answers from Prime Ministers and backbenchers so it was interesting to observe a brief bit of brevity from the Prime Minister in two of her answers on Wednesday.
Two slips of the tongue from the BBC.
Interviewers don’t always get what they ask for but when they do, it can often cause difficulties for the interview.
Continue reading “This can be a one word answer if you wouldn’t mind?”
Lawyers sometimes say that you should never ask a witness a question during trial to which you don’t the answer to. The same principles usually operates in Prime Minister’s questions in the House of Commons where the question and answer session is really one of “statement” followed by “statement” (even though the statements are dressed up as questions and answers).
A slip of the tongue from a Radio 4 Today programme presenter (Justin Webb).
Claire Perry, Conservative MP, seemed to enjoy asking questions on the Daily Politics today, so much so that Andrew Neil feared she was angling for his job.
A slip of the tongue by Boris Johnson.
“I am officially dead, although I’m alive, I have no income and because I am listed dead, I can’t do anything.”
Interviewers are always looking for ways to hurry their interviewees along, so finishing off their ideas seems to be a nice way to do this with the added advantage that you get the floor back. Why wait for the slow speaker to finish when you can do the job in half the time!
Continue reading “Finishing off your interviewee’s sentences”
Two slips of the tongues here, courtesy of BBC presenters.
Steel is steel. Without steel you don’t have a country.
In day-to-day conversation, closing a conversation requires both participants to clear the floor. That is, each has to offer the floor to the other and only when neither has anything more to contribute can the conversation close. If you have ever tried to get off the phone from a friend who doesn’t want to finish the conversation, you know how difficult this can be sometimes.
Yo Theresa May, where’s that money for Grenfell?
Andrew Neil was on fine form as he returned to hosting the Daily Politics on BBC1 on Wednesday. After chewing up Labour’s Andrew Gwynne, he turned his attention to Steve Baker, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wycombe.
Continue reading “Ouch! Direct, focused questioning at its best”
Everything’s simple when you’re a bit simple.
In general, only one person can hold the floor in a conversation. When a debate is taking place, there are often periods where negotiation of the floor occurs. The current speaker will use rhetorical devices to try and maintain the floor while other participants in the debate will interrupt and overlap in an attempt to gain the floor.
Slips of the tongue can be useful for understanding the psycholinguistic processing of speech output. Here is an interesting slip that occurred with a news reader on the BBC.
“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”
Interviewer: Are the Brexit talks in chaos, or are the actually making reasonable progress?”
Juncker: “They are.”
Is it “trite journalism” to ask the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer what the country pays on its national debt? Should the shadow chancellor have these figures to hand, or can he rely on an iPad or advisor to tell him? John McDonnell doesn’t seem to think so.
The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, suggested that ‘there are no unemployed people’ in Britain when he was interviewed on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday:
“Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat’?”
TV presenters in a political interview have the privilege of asking the questions, but what do you do when your interviewee refuses to answer outright and brushes up against the Cooperative Principle? This is what Kay Burley, Sky News presenter, was confronted with when she interviewed General Jack Keane, a retired 4-star US general on Monday.
Continue reading “Make your contribution such as it is required…”
Repairs, when initiated or performed by a conversational other, are often a reliable indicator of power within spoken discourse. However, additional social areas may also be underscored by this phenomenon. For example, the establishing or highlighting of a rapport.
Pausing briefly while speaking is a natural part of delivery. We pause for several reason. The most obvious one is to take breath so we can carry on speaking. Some pauses occur before content words or complex clauses suggesting that the cognitive planning processes can delay the output of the words. It has also been suggested that we pause more when we have to make choices in what words and expressions we select to say. So giving ones opinion would include more pause time on average than reporting factual ideas.
Continue reading “Pausing as a marker of equivocation intentions”
