Mrs Malaprop revisited: What can we learn from constructed speech errors?

Kornexl, Lucia

doi:10.1075/cilt.347.06kor

In:Norms and Conventions in the History of English
Edited by Birte Bös and Claudia Claridge
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 347] 2019
► pp. 99–128

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What can we learn from constructed speech errors?

Mrs Malaprop revisited

Lucia Kornexl | University of Rostock

Published online: 27 May 2019

https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.347.06kor

Abstract

Due to her untiring and constantly failing attempts to enhance her social standing by employing highly extravagant diction, Mrs Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) has given her name to a specific type of lexical misapplication exploited for humorous effect. While her ‘malapropisms’ have usually served as a starting point for scholarly investigations into similar speech errors produced by modern speakers, this paper asks what the original material, skilfully embedded in a ‘comedy of manners’, can tell us about the linguistic microstructure of such lexical mismatches, about their semantic relationship to the target words, and how this peculiar kind of material relates to modern speech error typologies. To examine these questions, the linguistic character of Mrs Malaprop’s malapropisms will be explored on the basis of some significant criteria applied in pertinent studies of Present-day English data. Sheridan’s material will also be seen in relation to relevant evidence provided by three leading 18th-century dictionaries and by the OED. I hope to show that, when examined in their original, late 18th-century context and tested against some major variables, Sheridan’s malapropisms are not so far away from linguistic reality as is often assumed. Yet however ‘authentic’ his constructed malapropisms may be, their skilful use for literary effect nevertheless calls for a special treatment.

Keywords: error/substitution – target, ‘hard words’, Latinate terms, literary sociolect, ‘classical’ malapropisms, Sheridan’s The Rivals, speech error typology, structural features, semantic relatedness

Article outline

1.Introduction
2.Defining malapropisms
3.Mrs Malaprop’s language: A literary sociolect
4.Mrs Malaprop’s malapropisms and modern speech error typology: Terminological questions and problems
5.Testing Mrs Malaprop: A sample analysis of structural features
- 5.1Wordhood
- 5.2Word class
- 5.3Linguistic microstructure
6.Malapropisms and semantics
7.Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Appendix

References (41)

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