Elision
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light". Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.
Citation forms and contextual forms
A word may be spoken individually in what is called the citation form. This corresponds to the pronunciation given in a dictionary. However, when words are spoken in context, it often happens that some sounds that belong to the citation form are omitted. Elision is not an all-or-nothing process: elision is more likely to occur in some styles of speaking and less likely in others. Many writers have described the styles of speech in which elision is most commonly found, using terms such as "casual speech", "spontaneous speech", "allegro speech" or "rapid speech". In addition, what may appear to be the disappearance of a sound may in fact be a change in the articulation of a sound that makes it less audible. For example, it has been said that in some dialects of Spanish the word-final -ado, as in cansado is pronounced /ado/ in citation form but the /d/ is omitted in normal speech, giving "cansao". More careful description will show that the Spanish phoneme /d/ is usually pronounced as a voiced dental fricative when it occurs between vowels. In casual speech it is frequently weakened to a voiced dental approximant . The most extreme possibility is complete elision resulting in a diphthong with no observable consonantal tongue gesture. In this view, elision is the final stage in lenition or consonant weakening, the last phase of a cline or continuum describable as d > ð > ð̞ > ∅. Whether the elision is of vowel or consonant, if it is consistent through time, the form with elision may come to be accepted as the norm: tabula > tabla as in Spanish, mutare > muer in French, luna > lua in Portuguese.It is usual to explain elision and related connected-speech phenomena in terms of the principle of least effort or "economy of effort". This concept has been stated as "If a word or expression remains perfectly intelligible without a certain sound, people tend to omit that sound."
Historical elisions
There are various ways in which the present form of a language may reflect elisions that have taken place in the past. This topic is an area of diachronic linguistics. Such elisions may originally have been optional but have over time become obligatory. An example of historical elision in French that began at the phrasal level and became lexicalized is preposition de > d' in aujourd'hui "today", now felt by native speakers to be one word, but deriving from au jour de hui, literally "at the day of today" and meaning "nowadays", although hui is no longer recognized as meaningful in French. In English, the word "cupboard" would originally have contained /p/ between /ʌ/ and /b/, but the /p/ is believed to have disappeared from the pronunciation of the word about the fifteenth century.Contractions
In many languages there is a process similar but not identical to elision, called contraction, where common words that occur frequently together form a shortened pronunciation. This may be a historical case or one that is still optional. Contractions of both sorts are natural forms of the language used by native speakers and are often colloquial but not considered substandard. English contractions are usually vowel-less weak form words. In some cases the contracted form is not a simple matter of elision: for example, "that's" as a contraction is made not only by the elision of the /ɪ/ of "is" but also by the change of final consonant from /z/ to /s/; "won't" for "will not" requires not only the elision of the /ɒ/ of "not" but also the vowel change /ɪ/ → /oʊ/ and in English RP "can't" and "shan't" change vowel from /æ/ of "can" and "shall" to /ɑː/ in /kɑːnt/, /ʃɑːnt/. In some languages employing the Latin alphabet, such as English, the omitted letters in a contraction are replaced by an apostrophe. Written Greek marks elisions in the same way.Elision in poetry
Elision is frequently found in verse. It is sometimes explicitly marked in the spelling, and in other cases has to be inferred from knowledge of the metre. Elisions occurred regularly in Latin, but were not written, except in inscriptions and comedy. Elision of a vowel before a word starting in a vowel is frequent in poetry, where the metre sometimes requires it. For example, the opening line of Catullus 3 is Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque, but would be read as Lugeto Veneres Cupidinesque. There are many examples of poetic contraction in English verse of past centuries marked by spelling and punctuation. Frequently found examples are over > o'er and ever > e'er. Multiple examples can be seen in lines such as the following from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, published in 1751:- Th' applause of list'ning senates to command
- He gain'd from heav'n a friend
Deletion
X --> ∅
An example of a deletion rule is provided by Giegerich. If we start with the premise that the underlying form of the word "hear" has a final /r/ and has the phonological form /hɪər/, we need to be able to explain how /r/ is deleted at the end of "hear" but is not deleted in the derived word "hearing". The difference is between word-final /r/ in "hear", where the /r/ would form part of the rhyme of a syllable, and word-medial /r/ which would form the onset of the second syllable of "hearing". The following rule deletes /r/ in "hear", giving /hɪə/, but does not apply in the case of "hearing", giving /hɪərɪŋ/.
rhyme
/r/ --> ∅/ _____
Examples
English
Examples of elision in English:| Word | IPA before elision | IPA after elision |
| natural | ||
| laboratory | ||
| laboratory | ||
| temperature | ,, sometimes | |
| family | ||
| vegetable | or devoiced into | |
| fifth | ||
| him | ||
| going to | ||
| it is, it has | , | |
| I have | ||
| is not |
Most elisions in English are not mandatory, but they are used in common practice and even sometimes in more formal speech. This applies to nearly all the examples in the above table. However, these types of elisions are rarely shown in modern writing and never shown in formal writing. In formal writing, the words are written the same whether or not the speaker would elide them, but in many plays and classic American literature, words are often written with an elision to demonstrate accent:
Other examples, such as him and going to shown in the table above, are generally used only in fast or informal speech. They are still generally written as is unless the writer intends to show the dialect or speech patterns of the speaker.
The third type of elision is in common contractions, such as can't, isn't, or I'm. The apostrophes represent the sounds that are removed and are not spoken but help the reader to understand that it is a contraction and not a word of its own. These contractions used to be written out when transcribed even if they were pronounced as a contraction, but now they are always written as a contraction so long as they are spoken that way. However, they are by no means mandatory and a speaker or writer may choose to keep the words distinct rather than contract them either as a stylistic choice, when using formal register, to make meaning clearer to children or non-native English speakers, or to emphasize a word within the contraction
In non-rhotic accents of English, is dropped unless it's followed by a vowel, making cheetah and cheater completely homophonous. In non-rhotic accents spoken outside of North America, many instances of correspond to in North American English as and are used instead of.
Finnish
The consonant in the partitive case ending -ta elides when it is surrounded by two short vowels except when the first of the two vowels involved is paragoge. Otherwise, it stays. For example, katto+ta → kattoa, ranta+ta → rantaa, but työ+tä → työtä, mies+ta → miestä, jousi+ta → jousta.French
Elision of unstressed vowels is common in the French language and, in some cases, must be indicated orthographically with an apostrophe.Elision of vowel and consonant sounds was also an important phenomenon in the phonological evolution of French. For example, s following a vowel and preceding another consonant regularly elided, with compensatory lengthening of the vowel.
- Latin hospitāle → Old French ostel → Modern French hôtel
- Latin spatha → Old French espee → Modern French épée
- Latin schola → Old French escole → Modern French école
German
The final e of a noun is also elided when another noun or suffix is concatenated onto it: Strafe + Gesetzbuch becomes Strafgesetzbuch.
In both of the above cases, the e represents a schwa.