ABSTRACT
The goal of speech production is to maximise communication, putting as many bits of retrievable information into every second of speech as possible (Boersma, 1998). Languages evolve in congruence with this efficiency principle. To this end, the most frequently used words tend to be the shortest ones in a language, and communication patterns develop to allow for a maximum of ellipsis – omissions of what is presumed to be understood by the listener. Zipf (1949) first summarised this evolutionary tendency as the principle of least effort – speakers want to minimise articulatory effort and hence encourage brevity and phonological reduction.
