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Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts, resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. This is a context where elision tends not to be sociolinguistically or perceptually salient. We find extensive variance within and between speakers in the realization of both the vowel and nasal segments. We also find evidence of a change in progress, with a mixed effects model showing that among the older speakers, elision is associated with both the place of articulation of the nasal segment and the metrical structure of the verbal stem, while among the younger speakers, elision is associated with place of articulation but metrical structure plays little role. This is in line with a reanalysis of the conditions for elision by younger speakers based on the variability present in the speech of older people. Such a reanalysis would also account for many of the sociolinguistically marked extended contexts of elision.

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

Changes by elision&mdash, as well as those due to processes of adfunctionalization or refunctionalization&mdash, must be taken into account as explanatory mechanisms of linguistic change. In this paper, we study the role of elision in the theoretical overview of explanatory theories of language change by focusing on the evolutionary process of the Spanish adverb aparte. We analyze the consequences of the elision of an initial construction for the development of new functions as an exceptive or additive adverb, and as an additive connector with a specific meaning, conditioned by the evolution of the entire construction. We find that, in this case, the ellipsis of a verbal element has led to important modifications of the preserved item (aparte), not only at the semantic-pragmatic and functional levels but also in its category membership.

Remarks on the Elision of Labial Consonants in Contemporary Polish MediaIntervocalic elision of labial consonants seems to be one of the most common types of distorting the pronunciation of contemporary Polish words in colloquial speech. This phenomenon was described by Biedrzycki (1978) as typical of everyday speech and unknown to media or in official situations. Now it has entered the world of electronic media on a large scale and has become something of a norm among television presenters as well as experts and actors. All of these speakers tend to employ articulatorily incorrect Polish in official situations. This paper includes a preliminary classification of contexts where the deletion of labials takes place, and as such it is a continuation of Jaskuła (2014). Moreover, an attempt has been made to determine the reasons for elision. Analyses of similar phenomena which can be found in the phonological literature concerning both Polish and other phonological systems have also been taken into account with a view to discovering whether or not there is an interplay between phonetics and phonology in this respect.

espanolLa elision de la raiz verbal es un fenomeno atestiguado inequivocamente solo en dos lenguas habladas en America y una familia linguistica de las Islas Andaman. Consiste en la elision de la raiz del verbo, en primer lugar bajo condiciones de recuperabilidad, dejando solamente afijos (y eventualmente cliticos) y, de esta manera, sometiendo a prueba los limites de la teoria y de las posibilidades morfologicas. El fenomeno es aqui examinado en las lenguas pertinentes: inuktitut, kwaza y algunos miembros de la familia gran andamanesa. Se discuten paralelos formales y funcionales con otros fenomenos tales como la elision del verbo (elision de la palabra entera) y morfemas y alomorfos de raices lexicas cero. EnglishVerb Root Ellipsis is a phenomenon attested robustly in only two languages spoken in the Americas and one language family of the Andaman Islands. It consists in the ellipsis of the root of the verb, primarily under conditions of discourse retrievability, leaving behind only affixes (and possibly clitics), thus testing the bounds of morphological possibilities and theory. The phenomenon is examined in the relevant languages: Inuktitut, Kwaza, and some members of the Great Andamanese family. Formal and functional parallels with other phenomena, such as verb ellipsis (ellipsis of the whole verb word) and lexical zero-root morphemes and allomorphs are discussed.

Vowel hiatus is dispreferred in many languages of the world. Xitsonga, an understudied cross-border Southern Bantu language spoken in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, employs a set of four hiatus resolution strategies: glide formation, secondary articulation, elision, and coalescence. Glide formation is the primary repair strategy, as it shows a least violation of faithfulness. In glide formation, /i/ and /u/ correspond to [j] and [w], respectively. It is blocked when V1 is preceded by a consonant, as this would incur a fatal violation of *COMPLEX. When glide formation is blocked, secondary articulation is the next preferred option. One of the interesting features of Xitsonga is that it allows secondary articulation involving mid-vowels /o e/. The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) is often the trigger for elision, the least preferred strategy. Vowel coalescence can take two forms in Xitsonga, namely /a + i/ → [e] and /a + u/ → [o], both of which incur a non-fatal violation of UNIFORMITY. When coalescence is blocked due to an impermissible sequence of /a/ and another vowel (excluding /i/ and /u/), the /a/ is elided. We argue that a single constraint hierarchy is responsible for these seemingly disjointed repair strategies. The overall significance of this paper lies in the fact that it is the first consolidated description and formal analysis of vowel hiatus resolution in Xitsonga.Keywords: Xitsonga, hiatus resolution, Optimality Theory, repair, glide formation, elision, coalescence, secondary articulation

The article shows that, in spite of their DP-internal appearance, many instances of the English preposition of and of the French preposition de can be reanalyzed as being VP-external. Moreover, it is argued that what looks like movement of a bare quantifier turns out to be remnant movement. It is also claimed that each +N subpart of DP must get its own Case, which means that (non-head) phrases never have Case. En català les seqüències de sibilants no es pronuncien mai com a tals. En la majoria de contextos s varietats coincideixen pel que fa a les «estratègies» que utilitzen per evitar aquestes seqüències, que poden ser l'epèntesi o l'elisió. La variació només es troba en el domini dels clítics pronominals (però no en el d'altres menes de clítics). Una de les fonts de variació s'explica mitjançant la divisió d'una restricció general en dues restriccions més específiques, la qual cosa implica una reordenació parcial de restriccions. L'altra font de variació, que inclou un cas d'opacitat aparent, s'explica mitjançant una restricció del tipus output-output que fa referència a relacions paradigmàtiques.

[eng] In Catalan, sequences of sibilants are never pronounced as such. In most contexts all varieties coincide in the «strategies» used to avoid these sequences, namely epenthesis or deletion. Variation is only found in the domain of pronominal clitics (but not with other types of clitics). One source of variation is accounted for by decomposing a general constraint into two specific ones, which implies partial constraint reranking. The other source of variation, which involves a case of apparent opacity, is explained through an Output-Output constraint that makes reference to paradigmatic relations., [eng] En català les seqüències de sibilants no es pronuncien mai com a tals. En la majoria de contextos totes les varietats coincideixen pel que fa a les «estratègies» que utilitzen per evitar aquestes seqüències, que poden ser l’epèntesi o l’elisió. La variació només es troba en el domini dels clítics pronominals (però no en el d’altres menes de clítics). Una de les fonts de variació s’explica mitjançant la divisió d’una restricció general en dues restriccions més específiques, la qual cosa implica una reordenació parcial de restriccions. L’altra font de variació, que inclou un cas d’opacitat aparent, s’explica mitjançant una restricció del tipus output-output que fa referència a relacions paradigmàtiques.

Speech tempo, vowel contraction/elision, and consonant deletion are common phonetic features of the Edo language spoken in Oredo, Orhionmwo, and Ovia Local Government Areas of Bendel State, Nigeria. Vowel contraction/elision in rapid speech usually occurs in word boundaries in larger constructions and often results in tonal modifications of such utterances. This paper focuses on speech tempo as it affects consonant deletion in Edo nouns. Two speech tempos, slow and rapid, will be used in explaining the presence or absence of consonant deletion in the language. Consonant deletion in rapid speech occurs exclusively in nouns. The tonal melody, the number of syllables, and the meanings of such nouns are not affected by consonant deletion. Consonant deletion in Edo nouns follows a regular pattern depending on the articulatory properties of the consonants in a given sequence.