Slip of the tongue and rectificative apposition in Arabic

What is it about?

While in European grammatical traditions appositions were only recognized as a grammatical – rather than a rhetorical – category around the 16th century, in the Arabic tradition their grammatical status was recognized from the very beginning, from around the 8th century. The early Arabic grammatical tradition even treated – implicitly but clearly enough – the opposition between close and loose apposition, which was not recognized in the European tradition until much later. Another unique feature of the Arabic tradition is the topic of this article: it would seem that the Arabic tradition was the first to deal with the problem of such speaker errors as lapses or attention or of memory. These errors are incorporated into the framework of the grammar, since corrections of such errors are taken to be a type of apposition. This article highlights the contribution that Arabic grammar can make to the question of the grammatization of appositions.

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Why is it important?

While our grammatical traditions are quite simply silent on the question of the slip of the tongue and the categorisation of its correction, the Arabic grammatical tradition is the first (and only) to take up the issue, thereby proving the extent to which this tradition knows how to take into account the dimensions of orality beyond the written word.

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