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Elisi On

The document discusses three linguistic processes involving the reduction or loss of sounds: elision, h-dropping, and cluster reduction. Elision is when phonemes like vowels and consonants are dropped to simplify pronunciation. H-dropping commonly occurs in unstressed pronouns and auxiliary verbs in English. Cluster reduction simplifies consonant clusters by deleting one consonant, especially when two plosives would occur together. Examples are given showing consonant elision within and between words.

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33 views2 pages

Elisi On

The document discusses three linguistic processes involving the reduction or loss of sounds: elision, h-dropping, and cluster reduction. Elision is when phonemes like vowels and consonants are dropped to simplify pronunciation. H-dropping commonly occurs in unstressed pronouns and auxiliary verbs in English. Cluster reduction simplifies consonant clusters by deleting one consonant, especially when two plosives would occur together. Examples are given showing consonant elision within and between words.

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NumanAshraf
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Elision

Elision is a process where one or more phonemes are dropped, usually in order to
simplify the pronunciation. It may occur for both vowels and consonants, although it is
much more common for consonants. Where it occurs for vowels, we have extreme cases
of vowel reduction or weakening to the point that the vowel is no longer pronounced at
all, such as in words like police, correct or suppose being realised as [pli:s], [kkt] or
[spz]. In rare cases, such as in some realisations of the word perhaps, both consonant
and vowel elision may even occur at the same time, e.g. yielding [paps].

h-Dropping
As we have alread heard, the dropping of initial <h> is a feature that is very common in
many accents of (especially English or English-influenced) English. Unstressed pronouns
as in give her/give him, [gv:]/[gvm] or tell her/tell him, [tl:]/[tlm] , or forms
of the auxiliary have as in would have, [wdv], should have, [dv], etc. exihibit h-
dropping even in the standard reference accents.

Cluster Reduction
When two or more consonants, often of a similar nature, come together, there is a
tendency in English to simplify such a cluster by eliding one of them. The longer the
cluster, the more of a chance there is of elision. Cluster reduction can occur in between as
well as inside words and mainly involves the deletion of voiceless oral plosives where it
would otherwise be more difficult to produce two plosives in a row as this would require
two closure phases. If a reduction occurs inside a word, it may also lead to a reduction in
the number of syllables, such as in the examples given in the introductory section above,
which have become mono-syllabic.

word/combination no elision elision


asked [:skt] [:st]
lecture [lkt] [lk]
desktop [dsktp] [dstp]
hard disk [h:ddsk] [h:dsk]
kept quiet [kptkwat] [kpkwat]
kept calling [kptko:l] [kpko:l]
kept talking [kptto:k] [kpto:k]
at least twice [tli:sttwas] [tli:stwas]
straight towards [stettwo:dz] [stetwo:dz]
next to [nkstt] [nkst]
want to [wntt] [wnt]
seemed not to notice [si:mdnttnts] [si:mntnts]
for the first time [ff:sttam] [ff:stam]

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