ABSTRACT
Phonetically motivated process of sound change that leads to the reduction of sounds and, in extreme cases, to loss of segments; typically this occurs in positions where assimilation is favored or in syllabically ‘weak’ positions (e.g. in final position, in unstressed syllables). Two types of weakening are distinguished. (a) Consonant weakening (also lenisization): this denotes a weakening of consonant strength (through a reduction in air pressure and muscle tension or an increase in sonority) to the complete loss of a segment; cf. the development of [p]>[b]>[β] in the comparison of Lat. lupus>OSpan. lobo [lobo] >Span. lobo [loβo] ‘wolf’ or the loss of [d] in comparison to Lat. vidēre with Span. ver ‘see.’ This process is also to be found in Celtic languages. (b) Vowel weakening: this is a term for all processes that lead to a weakening of the articulatory movement in the sense of an increasing centralization of vowels and finally a total loss of the vowel; cf. the loss of final vowels in English: OE nama [nama]>ME name [nεmə], Mod. Eng. name [neim]. Reduction processes of these types occur more often in less ‘carefully enunciated’ speech styles in informal situations. ( rapid vs slow speech)
References
sound change
Verb belonging to the semantically and syntactically motivated subgroup of verbs which denote weather phenomena with no discernible agent (rain, snow). ( also impersonal verb, valence)
Principle of word order formulated by O. Behaghel (‘Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder’) for German, which states that shorter constituents precede longer ones. The weight principle is assumed to be a universal word order rule within Functional Grammar (see Siewierska 1988; Dik 1989). Hawkins (1990, 1994) has shown that the short-before-long
language types (e.g. Japanese, Korean) longer constituents preferably precede shorter ones. Hawkins assumes that the weight principle belongs to language performance (i.e. language parsing or processing).
