Morpho-syntactic variations in English and Spanish clipped wordsa contrastive study

  1. Félix Rodríguez González 1
  2. José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo 1
  1. 1 Universitat d'Alacant-Universidad de Alicante, Españ
Revista:
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie

ISSN: 0049-8661 1865-9063

Año de publicación: 2018

Volumen: 134

Número: 3

Páginas: 734-760

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1515/ZRP-2018-0051 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Resumen

Clipping and linguistic variation are inexorably interconnected. Shortened or elliptical words reflect a great deal of variability of the language, especially in the morphological and phonological levels. The object of this study is precisely to explore the phono-graphemic and grammatical variations occurred in the visible changes undergone by clipped words in Spanish and English. A contrastive analysis of this type reveals both expectedly different correspondences in terms of gender and number, and surprisingly parallel lexico-syntactic features. This suggests that clipped or elliptical units are not only necessarily dependent on intrinsic morpho-grammatical and phonological traits, but they are also characterized by regularities and universal patterns that might show disruptive or “corrupted” constructs. This analysis confirms the peculiarities of clipping and linguistic variations in both languages, in an attempt to comprehend the interconnection between functional motivations, and morphological and phonological changes.