Mistakes

Yesterday's post "A stick with which to beat other women with" discussed the duplication of prepositions in the title phrase, and a commenter complained that

The woman interviewed has a pretty mediocre command of English (she doesn't pronounce a single coherent sentence and keeps stuttering) although she is an actress speaking in her native language. That she would make mistakes in her own language is thus regrettable but not especially surprising. I am not unaware that the concept "mistake" does not enjoy stellar prestige among linguists, but why is that particular error worthy of a blog entry?

As another commenter observed, my original post used the phrase "performance error" to describe the possibility that Emma Watson's preposition doubling was a mistake rather than a bona fide syntactic variant.

But my point today is that verbatim transcripts of spontaneous speech are often full of filled pauses, self-corrections, and other things that must be edited out in order to create what that commenter would count as a "coherent sentence". And this is true even for people who have risen far in the world on the basis of their ability to impress others in spontaneous verbal interaction.

For example, here's Justice Anthony Kennedy's first question during the 11/8/2016 oral argument in BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION, ET AL., Petitioners v. CITY OF MIAMI, FLORIDA, Respondent:

Your- is your concession- um oh not a concession your- y- your formulation that the city can sue sometimes are you thinking that the city might be in the same position as Home was in um was it the- the- uh Ha- the Havens case?

Or this passage from remarks by Stephen K. Bannon in a panel about "The Future of Conservatism", held at the National Press Club in Washington DC on 9/24/2013, and previously discussed in "The Narrow End of the Funnel", 8/18/2016:

w- I think it's given us a- uh I think it's given us a voice, I mean I think you don't have to go through the mainstream media filter any more you don't have to even real- concern about uh you know television or- or- or cable or whatever I mean we have a story up today of people that came to us from a- the Liberty Institute on this Craig James situation where Craig James was a broadcaster who was basically fired uh because uh in a- in a senatorial campaign he had uh discussed uh traditional marriage uh and after he was already working there somebody found the tape and they said uh you can't work here any more that- the- the- in- the- today this thing's gone viral uh it's a story we worked on it does- didn't have any uh TV backing any uh any uh broadcast backing or cable backing and we've gotten it up and it's already you know is going to have a million page views today and and- and go throughout so um

These are random examples from the first couple of transcribed recordings that I looked at — I could add examples from presidents, philosophers, scientists, novelists, poets, talk show hosts, and even usage experts.

The point: this is what (most) spontaneous speech is like. Emma Watson is no more disfluent or incoherent than Anthony Kennedy or Stephen Bannon or any of the rest of them. People who speak in perfect written paragraphs are almost pathologically unusual.

(See also "The rhetorical style of spontaneous speech", 8/16/2016.)