Elision
It is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant or a hole syllable) in a word or a phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker o pronounce. Sometimes, sounds maybe elided for euphonic effect.
In English elision is often unintentional, giving a result that may in some cases be impressionistically described as “slurred” or “muted” example:
Example time Nike
Weak form
Is a pronunciation of a word of syllable in an unstressed manner. Of course, the differences between the strong form and the weak form of a parent in writing, but in speech this two variations in pronunciation can be distractedly different. If spoken in isolation, the weak form of a word would probably be on inteligible. The diference between the two forms can effect meaning.
Examples:
John thinks that man is evil.
John thinks that man is evil.
Liaison
“Linking” or “joining together” of sounds is what this French word refers to. In general this is not something that speakers need to do anything active about – we produce the phonemes that belong to the words we are using in a more or less continuous stream, and the listener recognises them (or most of them) and receives the message. However, phoneticians have felt it necessary in some cases to draw attention to the way the end of one word is joined on to the beginning of the following word. In English the best-known case of liaison is the “linking r”: there are many words in English (e.g. ‘car’, ‘here’, ‘tyre’) which in a rhotic accent such as General American or Scots would be pronounced with a final r but which in BBC pronunciation end in a vowel when they are pronounced before a pause or before a consonant. When they are followed by a vowel, BBC speakers pronounce r at the end (e.g. ‘the car is’ ðə kɑ_r iz) – it is said that this is done to link the words without sliding the two vowels together (though it is difficult to see how such a statement could stand as an explanation of the phenomenon – lots of languages do run vowels together). Another aspect of liaison in English is the movement of a single consonant at the end of an unstressed word to the beginning of the next if that is strongly stressed: a well-known example is ‘not at all’, where the t of ‘at’ becomes initial (and therefore strongly aspirated) in the final syllable for many speakers.
Assimilation
If speech is thought of as a string of sounds linked together, assimilation is what happens to a sound when it is influenced by one of its neighbours. For example, the word ‘this’ has the sound s at the end if it is pronounced on its own, but when followed by ʃ in a word such as ‘shop’ it often changes in rapid speech (through assimilation) to ʃ, giving the pronunciation ðiʃʃɒp. Assimilation is said to be progressive when a sound influences a following sound, or regressive when a sound influences one which precedes it; the most familiar case of regressive assimilation in English is that of alveolar consonants, such as t, d, s, z, n, which are followed by non-alveolar consonants: assimilation results in a change of place of articulation from alveolar to a different place. The example of ‘this shop’ is of this type; others are ‘football’ (where ‘foot’ fυt and ‘ball’ bɔ_l combine to produce fυpbɔ_l) and ‘fruit-cake’(fru_t + keik → frυ_kkeik). Progressive assimilation is exemplified by the behaviour of the ‘s’ plural ending in English, which is pronounced with a voiced z after a voiced consonant (e.g. ‘dogs’ dɒ_z) but with a voiceless s after a voiceless consonant (e.g. ‘cats’ k_ts).
The notion of assimilation is full of problems: it is often unhelpful to think of it in terms of one sound being the cause of the assimilation and the other the victim of it, when in many cases sounds appear to influence each other mutually; it is often not clear whether the result of assimilation is supposed to be a different allophone or a different phoneme; and we find many cases where instances of assimilation seem to spread over many sounds instead of being restricted to two adjacent sounds as the conventional examples suggest. Research on such phenomena in experimental phonetics does not usually use the notion of assimilation, preferring the more neutral concept of coarticulation.
