Clipping (phonetics)

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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.

Examples[edit]

Dutch[edit]

Particularly in Netherlands Dutch, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare the /oː/ phoneme in konijn [kʊˈnɛin] 'rabbit' and koning [ˈkounɪŋ] 'king'.

English[edit]

Many dialects of English (such as Australian English, General American English, Received Pronunciation, South African English and Standard Canadian English) have two types of non-phonemic clipping: pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping.

The first type occurs in a stressed syllable before a fortis consonant, so that e.g. bet [ˈbɛt] has a vowel that is shorter than the one in bed [ˈbɛˑd]. Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in keychain /ˈkiː.tʃeɪn/) are not affected by this rule.[1]

Rhythmic clipping occurs in polysyllabic words. The more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are and so the first vowel of readership is shorter than in reader, which, in turn, is shorter than in read.[1][2]

Clipping with vowel reduction also occurs in many unstressed syllables.

Because of the variability of vowel length, the ː diacritic is sometimes omitted in IPA transcriptions of English and so words such as dawn or lead are transcribed as /dɔn/ and /lid/, instead of the more usual /dɔːn/ and /liːd/. Neither type of transcription is more correct, as both convey exactly the same information, but transcription systems that use the length mark make it more clear whether a vowel is checked or free. Compare the length of the RP vowel /ɒ/ in the word not as opposed to the corresponding /ɒ/ in Canadian English, which is typically longer (like RP /ɑː/) because Canadian /ɒ/ is a free vowel (checked /ɒ/ is very rare in North America,[citation needed] as it relies on a three-way distinction between LOT, THOUGHT and PALM) and so can also be transcribed as /ɒː/.

The Scottish vowel length rule is used instead of those rules in Scotland and sometimes also in Northern Ireland.

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). Therefore, the name Jadranka is pronounced [jâdraŋka], rather than [jâdraːŋka].[3]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Wells (2008), p. 155.
  2. ^ Wells, John C. (2006). "Lecture 3: The vowel system; clipping" (PDF). Retrieved 23 October 2016.
  3. ^ 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 (5th ed.), Leiden: Brill Publishers, ISBN 9004103406
  • Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 9781405881180