口误的意识性探究

People's daily speech can be divided into conscious speech acts and unconscious speech acts. For example, ordinary speech falls into the former while the balderdash and other senseless talks belong to the latter. Then what, one may ask, characterizes slips of the tongue? David Crystal in his The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language defines "slips of the tongue" as "involuntary departures from the speaker's intended production of a sequence of language units, which are very common. Sounds, syllables, morphemes, words, and sometimes larger units of grammar can be involved. Often, the deviant performance is immediately detected by the speaker (though not always consciously) and corrected." Following this definition, it's hard for us to decide whether a tongue slip is a conscious or unconscious speech act. It seems that one is unconscious when he/she makes speech errors, but often he/she is conscious of the mistake and corrects it immediately. Then, the question is whether slips of the tongue are conscious speech acts or unconscious speech acts? What induces speakers' slips of the tongue? Can they be avoided? This paper explores the questions above, especially whether slips of the tongue involve consciousness.