John Maidment's Blog

No, this post is not about Christmas.  It’s about elision again.  Jack Windsor Lewis in his latest blog entitled Elisions? Lor’! has commented on my musings on elision. There is too much there to deal with in a single post, so I’ll just concentrate on his statement: “He (i.e. me) doesn’t mention elisions of /l/.”

I should have made it clear that I had by no means finished with my list of elidable consonants, and /l/ was on my list. So here goes….

As Jack says, /l/ is frequently elided in only → [ˈəʊni], and maybe (but I would guess much less frequently) in words like loneliness and goalless. There are some other frequently used items where /l/ disappears, namely already, all right, always → [ɔ:redi ɔ:raɪt ɔ:wəz].

There is a problem with /l/ elision, though. It doesn’t affect Jack’s only, loneliness examples, but it does complicate many instances where /l/ might appear to be elided. I’m talking of /l/ vocalisation.

Chad the Phonetician

For those speakers who regularly vocalise [ɫ] and produce a vowel of the [o] type, it can be mighty hard to tell whether the /l/ segment is still there when the preceding vowel is /u: ʊ ɔ:/ or when the following consonant is /w/.

Anyway, the elision of /l/ is certainly possible in many varieties of English, but I can’t help feeling that is somehow different from the elision of /t/ and /d/. In order to state where /l/ elision occurs one is reduced to listing words and phrases, or listing a rather disparate set of environments, in which it can occur. Yes, it can occur in only, but not, I think, in mainly, finely, stubbornly ….. It seems to occur in the environments [ɔ:] _ [ɹ] and [ɔ:] _ [w], but not always (ho! ho!). I don’t think people zap the /l/ in fall-rise for instance. If they did it would be homophonous with four eyes. For alveolar plosive elision, on the other hand, one can set up a very general rule for its application.

For those of you puzzled by the cartoon, that is likely to be non-Brits and Brits of more tender years, please point your browser at this page.

Finally, apologies for the pun in the title.

BTW I haven’t finished with elision yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Phonetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.