Truncation (language)
Truncation ( Latin truncare , German 'cut off' , English truncation ) is a word formation phenomenon in linguistics in which a word is shortened to a certain length. Often further morphological or phonological transformations take place, such as affiliation , umlaut or resilbification .
Demarcation and similar phenomena
In contrast to regression , in which the truncated part of a word has a certain length, with truncation the remaining part is of a fixed size.
Partial reduplication is closely related to truncation . In this case, a version of a word shortened to a certain length is appended to the word itself. In Ilokano , a Filipino language, the plural of a noun is formed by copying the stem of the noun itself and placing this copy (the so-called reduplicant ) at the beginning of the noun after reducing ("truncating") to the first syllable. In the following example, the truncation of a reduplicant is indicated by strikethrough:
kaldiŋ |
kal |
kalkaldiŋ |
"Goose" | Reduplicant - root | "Geese" |
Examples from German
i-truncation
An example of truncation in German is the i-truncation. Longer words are shortened to the first heavy syllable and an -i is added to the end of the new word. Examples are:
- Student → Studi
- Alcoholics → Alki
- Depression → Depri
- East German (er) → Ossi
- Michael → Michi
- Andreas → Andi
- Gabriele → Gabi
The i-truncation in German often has a caressing or belittling meaning.
Shortening
In addition to i-truncation, there is another type of truncation in German in which a word is reduced to the first two syllables, the last of the two syllables being light, i.e. i.e. ending in a vowel:
- Demonstration → Demo
- Pornography → Porn
- homosexual → homo
- Disco → disco
- University → Uni
Differences in meaning in this type of truncation are often absent in German, mostly for reasons of linguistic economy .
literature
- Laura Benua: Identity Effects in Morphological Truncation. University of Massachusetts Amherst , 1995. (English, roa.rutgers.edu [accessed October 27, 2009]; Memento in the Internet Archive of September 7, 2009; various formats: PDF; 219 kB).
- Paul Smolensky : On the Comprehension / Production Dilemma in Child Language. In: Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 27, No. 4, 1996, ISSN 1049-7501 , pp. 720-731, JSTOR 4178959 (English; pre-final draft online , accessed on October 27, 2009, page no longer available).