Speech error Vietnam War. Speech error A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue (Latin: lapsus linguae, or occasionally self-demonstratingly, lipsus languae) or misspeaking, is a deviation (conscious or unconscious) from the apparently intended form of an utterance. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors. Some examples of speech error include sound exchange or sound anticipation errors. In sound exchange errors the order of two individual morphemes
Lapsus psychoanalytic theory, a lapsus represents a bungled act that hides an unconscious desire: “the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material...pushed away by consciousness”. Jacques Lacan would thoroughly endorse the Freudian interpretation of unconscious motivation in the slip, arguing that “in the "lapsus" it is...clear that every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse”. In the seventies Sebastiano Timpanaro would controversially take up the question again, by offering a mechanistic explanation of all such slips, in opposition to Freud's theories. In literature, a number of different types of lapsus are named depending on the