History of the English language
passion" The same principle applies to whole phrasesand even sentences, which shows that
they, too, are largely preassembled in the mind before being uttered. On the sentence level
sometimes the term "spoonerisms" is used < Reverend Spooner (19th century) famous for
metathetic slips of the tongue:"You have tasted two worms" (pro "You have wasted two
terms").The defining feature in the case of metathesis is that all sounds remain in
theword (sentence), they just change places. It is this feature that allows psycholinguists
to infer that words and sentences are preassembled in the mind: all sounds are there but the
order gets mixed up in the process of actual uttering/pronouncing.
NB! Slips of the tongue in which sounds of a word or sentence are not dropped but merely
change places
1) are made possible by preassembling and therefore
2) serve as evidence of preassembling.
annaabi.ee 
