Clipping (phonetics)
In phonetics, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a vowel. A clipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often also reduced.
Contents
Examples[edit]
Dutch[edit]
Particularly in Netherlands Dutch, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare konijn [köˈnɛin] and koning [ˈkoːnɪŋ].
In weak forms of words, e.g. naar and voor, the vowel is frequently centralized: [näːr, föːr], though further reduction to [nə, fə] or [nr̩, fr̩] is possible in rapid colloquial speech.[1]
English[edit]
English has two types of clipping, neither of which are phonemic.
Pre-fortis clipping[edit]
In English, clipping without vowel reduction most often occurs in a stressed syllable before a voiceless consonant or Fortis consonant (called pre-fortis clipping), so that e.g. bet [ˈbɛt] has a vowel that is shorter than the one in bed [ˈbɛˑd].[2]
Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in keychain /ˈkiː.tʃeɪn/) are not affected by the pre-fortis clipping.
Rhythmic clipping[edit]
Another type of clipping is rhythmic clipping, which occurs in polysyllabic words - the more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are, so that e.g. the first vowel of readership is shorter than in reader, which in turn is shorter than in read.[2][3] This can be transcribed [ˈridəʃɪp], [ˈriˑdə] and [ˈriːd], respectively, though the rhythmic clipping is very rarely transcribed in IPA.
Clipping with vowel reduction also occurs in many unstressed syllables.
Serbo-Croatian[edit]
Many speakers of Serbo-Croatian from Croatia and Serbia pronounce historical unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions, such as genitive plural endings,[4] so that e.g. the name Jadranka is pronounced [jâdranka], rather than [jâdraːnka].
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Collins & Mees, pp. 227, 240.
- ^ a b Wells (2008), p. ?.
- ^ Wells, John C. (2006). "Lecture 3: The vowel system; clipping" (PDF). Retrieved 23 October 2016.
- ^ Alexander (2006), p. 356.
Bibliography[edit]
- Alexander, Ronelle (2006), Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian – A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary, The University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 978-0-299-21194-3
- Collins, Beverley; Mees, Inger M. (2003) [First published 1981], The Phonetics of English and Dutch (PDF) (5th ed.), Leiden: Brill Publishers, ISBN 9004103406
- Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 9781405881180
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