Phonetic Erosion
Phonetic erosion (also called phonological attrition or phonological reduction), is another process that is often linked to grammaticalization. It implies that a linguistic expression loses phonetic substance when it has undergone grammaticalization. Heine writes that "once a lexeme is conventionalized as a grammatical marker, it tends to undergo erosion; that is, the phonological substance is likely to be reduced in some way and to become more dependent on surrounding phonetic material". Heine and Kuteva have also described different kinds of phonetic erosion:
- Loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables.
- Loss of suprasegmental properties, such as stress, tone, or intonation.
- Loss of phonetic autonomy and adaptation to adjacent phonetic units.
- Phonetic simplification
'Going to' → 'gonna' and 'because' → 'coz' are examples of erosion in English. Another example is the change of the phrase "by the side of" to the preposition "beside". Some linguists trace erosion to the speaker's tendency to follow the principle of least effort, while others think that erosion is a sign of changes taking place. However, phonetic erosion is not a necessary property of grammaticalization. It is a common process of language change in general, and occurs outside of grammaticalization as well.
Read more about this topic: Grammaticalization, Mechanisms
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“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
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