Aphaeresis in Rapid Speech

T HE DELETION OF INITIAL SYLLABLES is a prominent and widespread feature that occurs in the language of ordinary English conversation. These deletions can be conveniently divided into three types: V, VC, and CV.1 Initial syllable deletion is a stylistic option available to English speakers in rapid speech. The best known treatment for rules of this type is probably Labov's variable rule.2 In theory, the order of likelihood that any speaker will delete a particular type of syllable can be predicted statistically, through a consideration of the surrounding environment and a known general tendency established by many hours of listening. Deletion would be more or less probable depending upon stress and the sounds which immediately precede and follow the syllable in question. In reality, it is extremely difficult, if possible at all, to create a neat statistical study of this kind for initial syllable deletion. There are two serious obstacles: accumulating adequate data and the resistance of the data to this type of analysis. I made several attempts to gather useful information. Controlled probes were generally unsuccessful, presumably because people are sensitive to this aspect of language and are readily made conscious of it. In the end, I simply wrote down examples of initial syllable deletion whenever I detected them. From these data, quantitative statements can be made about which environments are favorable and unfavorable to initial syllable deletion, but claims cannot be made about the overall frequency of such deletions either within a dialect or within the idiolect of any one speaker. Also, an unforeseen factor arose in that certain lexical items seem to be deletion prone. This problem will be considered below. Certain minimal constraints apply to all initial syllable deletion. Two of these are environmental restrictions: (1) the syllable to be deleted must occur under minimal stress in the full word; and (2) the syllable that follows the deletable syllable must bear primary or secondary stress. Somewhat surprisingly, sentence stress plays no role. Thus there are sentences such as

Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy

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