Elision

The nature of elision may be stated quite simply: under certain circumstances sounds disappear. One might express this in more technical language by saying that in certain circumstances a phoneme may be realized as zero, or have zero realization or be deleted. As with assimilation, elision is typical of rapid, casual speech. Producing elisions is something which foreign learners do not need to learn to do, but it is important for them to be aware that when native speakers of English talk to each other, quite a number of phonemes that the foreigner might expect to hear are not actually pronounced. We will look at some examples, although only a small number of the many possibilities can be given here.

i) Loss of weak vowel after p, t, k.

In words like 'potato', 'tomato', 'canary', 'perhaps', 'today', the vowel in the first syllable may disappear; the aspiration of the initial plosive takes up the whole of the middle portion of the syllable, resulting in these pronunciations (where h indicates aspiration in the phonetic transcription):

p^h'teɪtəʊ     t^h'mɑ:təʊ    k^h'neəri     p^h'hæps   t^h'deɪ

ii) Weak vowel + n, l, r becomes syllabic consonant. For example:

'tonight' tṇaɪt   'police' pḷi:s   'correct' kṛekt

iii) Avoidance of complex consonant clusters.

It has been claimed that no normal English speaker would ever pronounce all the consonants between the last two words of the following:

'George the Sixth's throne'              ʤɔ:ʤ  ðə  sɪksθs θrəʊn

Though this is not impossible to pronounce, something like sIksTr@Un or sIksr@Un is a more likely pronunciation for the last two words. In clusters of three plosives or two plosives plus a fricative, the middle plosive may disappear, so that the following pronunciations result:

'acts' æks, 'looked back' lʊk bæk, 'scripts' skrɪps

iv) Loss of final v in 'of before consonants; for example:

'lots of them' lɒts a  ðεm, 'waste of money' weɪst ə mΛni

This last example is typical of very casual speech, and would be regarded as substandard by conservative listeners. A more common case is where the vowel of 'of' is lost, leaving either v in a voiced context (e.g. 'all of mine' O:l v maIn) or f in a voiceless context (e.g. 'best of three' best f Tri:).

It is difficult to know whether contractions of grammatical words should be regarded as examples of elision or not. The fact that they are regularly represented with special spelling forms makes them seem rather different from the above examples. The best-known cases are:

· 'had', 'would': spelt'd, pronounced d (after vowels), əd (after consonants);

· 'is', 'has': spelt's, pronounced s (after fortis consonants), z (after lenis consonants), except that after s, z, ʃ, Ʒ, ʧ, ʤ 'is' is pronounced Iz and 'has' is pronounced @z in contracted form;

· 'will': spelt 'll, pronounced l (after vowels), ḷ (after consonants);

· 'have': spelt' ve, pronounced v (after vowels), əv (after consonants);

· 'not': spelt n't, pronounced nt (after vowels), ṇt(after consonants). There are also vowel changes associated with n't (e.g. 'can' kæn - 'can't' kɑ:nt; 'do' du: - 'don't' dəʊnt; 'shall' ʃæl -'shan't' ʃɑ:nt);

· 'are': spelt 're, pronounced a after vowels, usually with some change in the preceding vowel (e.g. 'you' ju: - 'you're' jʊə or jɔ:, 'we' wi: - 'we're' wɪə, 'they' ðeɪ - 'they're' ðeə); linking is used when a vowel follows. Contracted 'are' is also pronounced as ə or ər when following a consonant.