Clipping

3 Key excerpts on "Clipping"

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  American-Spanish Semantics

  • Charles E. Kany(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  SHORTENING The process of shortening, if kept within the bounds of clarity, normally renders expression more effective. Its shortcuts, its economy of effort, and its suggestive reticence all contribute greatly to the communicative func- tion of speech. It may be brought about by a need for euphemisms. It is especially prone to develop rapidly in moments of relaxed attention to unimportant details that obstruct the stream of communication. Emphatic words or syllables remain, while unstressed words or syllables may be lost. For example, unstressed preposition para is easily reduced to pa, but the stressed verb para is never so slurred. It may be said in passing that shortenings usually change the meaning only slightly, if at all, and are considered of minor consequence in the study of semasiology. How- ever, many of them are important factors in the process called restriction (see chap. xi). Stern distinguishes between two main types of shortening: Clipping, or the shortening of a single word, and omission, or the total dropping of one or more words of an expression. Only historical shortenings will be here considered; that is, the present form of an expression will be com- pared with its earlier form. ClippingS A Clipping may be a new word ( cocido > coci), or it may be identical in meaning with a previously existing word ( metropolitano > metro). 252 • Shortening Examples will be listed in three groups: those illustrating apocope, or loss of final sounds (cochino > cochi); those illustrating aphaeresis, or loss of initial sounds (señor > ñor); and those illustrating syncope, in which the loss is within a word ( continuo > contino). Apocope is the most common type of shortening. The Spanish listen- er's imagination reacts with unusual vivacity, comprehending the entire expression long before it is completely uttered. Proof of this is the multi- tude of shortenings heard in familiar conversation.

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  Extra-grammatical Morphology in English

  Abbreviations, Blends, Reduplicatives, and Related Phenomena

  • Elisa Mattiello(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  7.3.1.2. The primary functions of Clipping are to establish or reinforce in- formality and social closeness. Clipping normally involves an informal regis- ter and contributes to the regulation of social relationships. In speech act terms, clipped words have a fundamental role in the modulation of the illocu- tionary force of a speech act. In particular, they appear to have a mitigatory function (Bazzanella, Caffi, and Sbisà 1991; Caffi 2001) of the unwelcome effects that an act such as an order, a request, a criticism, or the announce- ment of bad news may have on the addressee. Below is an example of a mitigated request: Contextualising extra-grammatical phenomena 221 (14) Ted: Uh, listen, can I speak to you outside for a sec? Mr. Mosby: Sure. (How I Met your Mother, Season 2, Episode 3, 2006) The abbreviated form of the word second iconically represents in (14) a shortened lapse of time, and a reduced risk to obtain a dispreferred answer (i.e. a refusal) from the hearer. Analogously, the assertive speech act in (15) below takes the form of a mitigated criticism thanks to Clipping devices: (15) Rachel: He’s so cute! And he seems to like you so much. Phoebe: I know, I know. So sweet… and so complicated. And for a shrink, he’s not too shrinky, y’know? (Friends, Season 1, Episode 13, 1994) The shortened word shrink, originally from headshrinker and used as a slang word to refer to ‘a psychiatrist’ (OED2), is here iconic of a reduced distance between the speaker and her referent. The clipped word is even jocularly used as the base of adjective-forming -y suffixation (shrink-y), as a further confirmation of the non-serious attitude of the speaker (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994) and of the jocular effects she intends to achieve. The immediacy of clipped words makes them a favourite choice in famil- iar contexts, especially to mark an intimate or close relationship between the interactants.

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  Expanding the Lexicon

  Linguistic Innovation, Morphological Productivity, and Ludicity

  • Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Angelika Braun, Claudine Moulin, Esme Winter-Froemel, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Angelika Braun, Claudine Moulin, Esme Winter-Froemel(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

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  1Introduction

  This article is concerned with two types of truncatory processes: truncated personal names as they are used in many languages to form vocatives and hypocoristics, and truncated non-names. I will use the term ‘truncated names’ to refer to the former and ‘Clippings’ to refer to the latter. Both truncated names and Clippings can occur with or without suffixes. Examples of the different types of truncation are given in (1)–(3).61

  As becomes evident from the examples cited, ‘truncation’ is actually a misnomer for the processes exemplified. Especially among the suffixed forms, derivative forms62 are not necessarily shorter than their base forms (compare e.g. Rolf-i ⧫ Rolf ). What we see, instead, is that most truncation is templatic, which means that the formal properties of the process are best described in terms of the resulting output structure (in the examples in (1)–(3): a monosyllabic or a disyllabic word) rather than in terms of what and how much material is deleted from the base word (cf. Alber and Arndt-Lappe 2012; Manova 2016 for discussion). If we accept that truncation is best described in terms of such an output-oriented perspective, it becomes clear that forms like Rolfi (⧫ Rolf ), in spite of the fact that no truncation in a literal sense is involved, belong to the same kind of morphological category: Like Kati (⧫ Katharina ), the output form Rolf-i corresponds to a disyllabic template. Also functionally, there is no difference between forms like Rolfi and forms like Kati .

  In terms of the topic of this volume, truncations constitute an interesting case, as their form and meaning straddle the boundaries of what is considered regular word-formation in many frameworks (cf. e.g. Ronneberger-Sibold 2015a for a recent summary). At the same time many truncation processes undoubtedly display a high degree of productivity, in the sense that a lot of new forms are being coined, with a both regular and predictable form and function. This is particularly true of name truncations in many languages (on form cf. e.g. Alber and Arndt-Lappe 2012 for a summary of the literature; on function cf. e.g. Schneider 1993, 2003 on German and English name truncations, respectively, Lappe 2007 on English; Alber 2010 on Italian). What I want to argue in this paper, on a general level, is that looking at productive truncation patterns can teach us something about what regular word-formation is like. On a more specific level, this paper is meant as a step towards laying out a research agenda that may help to develop a better understanding of how, in spite of the analytical challenges, truncation works as a regular and productive mechanism of lexical expansion.

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