|
Elision
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) 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 /fɜ:s laɪt/. Many other terms are used to refer to particular cases where sounds are omitted. Citation forms and contextual forms A word may be spoken individually in what is called the Lemma (morphology), 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetic Contraction
Poetic contractions are contractions of words found in poetry but not commonly used in everyday modern English. Also known as elision or syncope, these contractions are usually used to lower the number of syllables in a particular word in order to adhere to the meter of a composition. In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm. Many of these poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked down upon in standardized formal writing. This development may have been influenced by the publication of Samuel Johnson's ''A Dictionary of the English Language ''A Dictionary of the English Language'', sometimes published as ''Johnson's Dictionary'', was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. It is among the most influential di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contraction (grammar)
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted. The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic ''blend''), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as ''do'' and ''not'', whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes. English English has a number of con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |