Investigating English clippings experimentally:

Résumé 0

This paper investigates English clippings such as prof (< professor), delish (< delicious), or condo (< condominium). Clipping is highly variable, but a growing body of evidence suggests that clipping variability follows predictable tendencies (Lappe 2007; Berg 2011; Arndt-Lappe 2018; Hilpert et al. 2021). As yet, however, experimental work on clipping variability is scarce. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on speakers’ choices between consonant-final clippings (e.g. renov < renovation) and vowel-final clippings (reno < renovation). We devise two experiments in order to analyze the factors that impact speaker behavior. The first is a forced choice task in which participants see a source word (e.g. emollescence) and two possible clippings that differ in their final segment (emo vs. emol). We find that speakers’ choices are sensitive to word length, stress position, status of a compound or a lexicalized multi-word unit, and the vowel type in the final syllable. The second study is a production task in which participants see a source word and propose a clipping. The responses show a preference for final consonants in monosyllabic clippings and clippings that derive from compounds or lexicalized multi-word units. We contextualize our results against the background of empirical work on clipping that has been carried out on the basis of large databases (Lappe 2007; Berg 2011; Hilpert et al. 2021).