The Non-Anomalous Nature of Anomalous Utterances

An analysis of speech errors provides evidence for the psychological reality of theoretical linguistic concepts such as distinctive features, morpheme structure constraints, abstract underlying forms, phonological rules, and syntactic and semantic features. Furthermore, such errors reveal that linguistic performance is highly rule-governed, and that in many cases it is grammatical rules which constrain or monitor actual speech production. While a model of linguistic competence is independent of temporal constraints, a model of linguistic performance must provide information as to the sequencing of events in real time. To explain the occurrence of particular kinds of errors, a specific ordering of rules is posited, which ordering may or may not coincide with the organization of a grammar.