Thursday 5 November 2009

ELISION REVIEW




As we saw on Thursday’s class, we had a short review about what linking, assimilation and elision are. But now I am going to try to explain what elision is. Firstly, I want to remind you what elision is: The omission of one or more sounds in a phrase or in a word. Some letters which are between two consonants do not sound; this refers to the sound that will be silenced. This can help the speaker to pronounce words in an easier and quicker way.

Some examples of these words are:


comfortable: /ˈkʌmfərtəbəl//ˈkʌmftərbəl/
fifth: /ˈfɪfθ//ˈfɪθ/
him: /hɪm/ /ɪm/
laboratory: /ˈbɔrətɔri/læbrətɔri/ (American English), /ləˈbɔrətri/ (British English)
temperature: /ˈtɛmpərətʃər//ˈtɛmpərtʃər/, /ˈtɛmprətʃər/
vegetable: /ˈvɛdʒətəbəl//ˈvɛdʒtəbəl/


As we noticed in the song Don’t speak, we went over some of the occurrences of elision. Elision happens mostly in songs, in poetry, in theatrical plays, in order to maintain a particular rhythm.


REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision (examples)
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/knowledge-wiki/elision

WEB SITES which can be useful for studying more about elision
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/connected-speech-2
http://ell.phil.tu-chemnitz.de/phon/connect/elision.html

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the brief summary of elision, Alhelí. We can note that elision actually takes place in all forms of fluent speech in English, and some accents feature more elision than others. We'll be looking at this in the coming weeks.

    If anyone want's to check out the examples of elision in No Doubt's 'Don't Speak', the video can be seen on YouTube using the link below:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5dGepZM810

    If anyone has found websites with audio examples of elision, please add the link for us all.

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