parandum

Parandum is a technical term used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to describe a portion of an utterance that is planned but ultimately abandoned or altered during real-time speech production. The term is borrowed from Latin, where parandum is the neuter gerundive of parare, meaning something to be prepared or ready; in linguistic usage it labels the initial plan in a speech error that is replaced in the repair.

In models of speech production and error analysis, parandum is typically described as part of the mechanism by which a speaker corrects or renegotiates what is being said. A speaker may begin to utter a sequence, encounter a mismatch or interruption, and subsequently replace the parandum with a repair to yield a final utterance. The concept is interpreted as evidence for stage-based planning and monitoring in production. Parandum is often discussed alongside related terms such as repair and reparandum, which together describe the structure of a correction event.

In practical terms, parandum helps researchers distinguish between what was planned to be spoken before an error and what was ultimately spoken after the repair. The concept appears in experimental and theoretical investigations of spontaneous speech errors, error detection, and repair timing, contributing to broader understandings of how linguistic plans are formulated and adjusted in real time. See also: speech error, self-repair, Levelt model, psycholinguistics.