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Elision (Omission)

Elision refers to the omission or loss of sounds, particularly consonant clusters, weakly stressed syllables, and words ending in alveolar consonants followed by words starting with consonants. The elided sounds are so weakly articulated that they no longer have auditory significance. Standard punctuation sometimes represents elided syllables, like "I'm" for "I am", and the missing vowel is still understood in speech. Elision contributes to mismatches between spelling and pronunciation in English, like "Wednesday" originally contracting from "Odin's day" where the "d" from Odin is no longer pronounced. Elision is most common in connected speech and increases with faster speech rates.

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Patrícia Argôlo Rosa
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1K views

Elision (Omission)

Elision refers to the omission or loss of sounds, particularly consonant clusters, weakly stressed syllables, and words ending in alveolar consonants followed by words starting with consonants. The elided sounds are so weakly articulated that they no longer have auditory significance. Standard punctuation sometimes represents elided syllables, like "I'm" for "I am", and the missing vowel is still understood in speech. Elision contributes to mismatches between spelling and pronunciation in English, like "Wednesday" originally contracting from "Odin's day" where the "d" from Odin is no longer pronounced. Elision is most common in connected speech and increases with faster speech rates.

Uploaded by

Patrícia Argôlo Rosa
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ELISION (OMISSION)

ELISION (OMISSION)
Elision refers to when a sound or syllable is lost or omitted. It particularly affects: consonant clusters; weakly stressed syllables that are not especially missed; and words that end in an alveolar consonant and that are immediately followed by a word beginning with a consonant. The sounds that are elided are those sounds that are so weakly articulated that they no longer have any auditory significance. Some elided syllables are represented in standard punctuation, for example, /I'm/ should be /I am/. In standard speech, the missing vowel is understood and so meaning does not suffer from this contraction.

ELISION (OMISSION)
Elision is one of the reasons for the great mismatches found in English between a word's spelling and its pronunciation. /wednesday/, for example, was originally a contraction of /Odin's day/ while today, Odin is barely discernable as the /d/ is no longer pronounced. Elision is most commonly used in, but is not exclusive to, connected speech. The faster the speech, the more likely that sounds and syllables will be elided.

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