Contracted words in the English language

Introduction.

English language is constantly changing, as any other language. New words and tendencies appear in its informal part, but as it is an everyday language some of its changes become very important for those who want to know it well, and what’s more important, to understand and speak it fluently.

The shortening of the words is one of the main trends in development of Modern English, especially in its colloquial layer, which, in its turn at high degree is supported by development of modern informational technologies and simplification of alive speech.

The problems of shortened lexical units as specific language phenomena in modern languages attracted attention of many researchers. These problems are considered to numerous articles and separate researches of Kazakh, Russian and foreign authors.

The main reason for choosing this topic is that there are many words and word groups which have their shortened version. I decided to look up what contractions are commonly used in mass media, informational and technical sphere. The other reason is to figure out when and how contractions are used in spoken language.

           The currency of our work is caused by the following factors:

• the use of informal contractions on TV and in movies and songs ;

• the great popularity of blogs and chatrooms of online communication;

• the necessity to learn the reduced forms used in daily speech for you to sound more like a native speaker of English. 
  
  The main goal of our work is to find out what modern contractions are not taught at school.

To reach the goal we were:

• to give a definition of contractions in general;

• to find out the main contractions in informal language;

• to find out the examples of usage of these phenomena in the Internet.

Such methods of researching as analysis, comparison and opinion poll were used.

The object of the research: is lexical level of English language.

The subject of the research: is types and functions of shortenings in English language.

The aim of the research: is giving general characteristics to shortened lexical units and defining the main ways, types, causes and functions. 

The objectives:

Collect theoretical material about abbreviations, their functions and meanings.

Study and analyze the scientific and educational literature.

Analyze the existing categorizations of shortenings.

Define the functions of shortened lexical units.

Perform practical analysis about the usage of abbreviations in mass media, medicine, informational and technical sphere.

The hypothesis: if we develop students’ knowledge of shortened words, we can widen their vocabulary and develop speech in English language.

Methods of research:

Methods of analysis of the information sources and references;

critical study of scientific literature;

description;

comparison;

observation.

Structure of the research: This course paper consists of introduction, two parts, conclusion, references and appendices. In the first part theoretical aspects of types and classifications of shortenings are considered. In the second part there are practical aspects of using shortenings in mass media, medicine, informational and technical sphere.

The practical value: This material can be recommended for widening vocabulary and development of speech and knowledge of English language.

CHAPTER I

Informal English contractions are similar to contractions. Contractions in English are words or phrases that are shortened by dropping one or more letters and replacing the letters with an apostrophe. This short form is often used in speaking and in informal writing.

Informal contractions are shortened forms of other words and phrases in English. They are like slang. Slang is a very informal way of talking. For example, you might say yeah instead of yes, or you might say cool to say you like something or agree with someone.

If you say kind of really fast, you can shorten it to kinda by dropping the final sound. If you say don't know really fast, it shortens to dunno. These are informal contractions. Informal contractions are very common in American English. We don't usually write them except in texts, casual emails, and informal comments on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

Since informal contractions are not often written, most of the spellings are phonetic. That means that we spell them the way they sound. Some people might spell them differently than what you will see here. Also, sometimes people write them with apostrophes, and sometimes they do not use apostrophes.

Contraction is a term used in linguistics to refer to the process or result of phonologically reducing a linguistic form so that it comes to be attached to an adjacent linguistic form, or fusing a sequence of forms so that they appear as single form. Whereas formal as part of a system of ‘formality’ of expression, referring to a level of language considered appropriate to socially formal situation. This study investigates some of informal contractions which are used in spoken English in conversations and in Mass Media. This study concentrates on the informal level because this level prevails in conversation in everyday interaction in variety of situations. The principle of contraction is: less contact means that the realization of the meaning selected has to be less explicit, whereas more contact means that more can be left unsaid.

1. Peculiarities of spoken English.

When people speak they can help to make our meaning clear by changing the tone of their voice, by pausing, or by using gestures. If they speak for two or three minutes without ever pausing or changing the tone of their voice, no one would understand what they were trying to say. Written English is most often planned, while spoken English is most often unplanned. Written English also usually uses standard grammar. In spoken, non-standard subject-verb agreements, ellipsis of auxiliary and/or subject, nonstandard word order, fragmented sentences etc. are all very common. Written English usually uses more jargon, while spoken uses more slang. This is because written is usually in a more formal register than spoken. Spoken English also makes use of more than just words - context cues, tone, gestures, eye contact and body language all play a part in spoken communication, while written English lacks these. Spoken English also contains discourse particles such as, 'like', 'so yeah' and 'y'know'. As much as they are disliked by the 'elite', they do serve many functions. 'Like' can be used to soften the blow of a statement ("I'm, like, kind of busy tomorrow."), or to indicate that something was said or thought ("She was like, 'Whatever.'"). 'Y'know' can be used to include the audience, ("VCE's just so busy, y'know?"), or to confirm that the audience has understood. Spoken English also contains non-fluency features, due to being largely unplanned and spontaneous. For example, pause-fillers. Pause fillers are words such as 'um' and 'er', that have no meaning by themselves, but are used to fill pauses in conversation and to indicate that the speaker has not finished talking. Spoken English also contains repetition and selfcorrection - again, because it is spontaneous. Overlaps and interruptions are also common, as speech is usually dialogue. Some overlaps are not necessarily used to override the current speaker - many overlaps are just listeners giving support and recognition, by saying things like, 'yeah', 'uhuh' and 'I know what you mean ' (Bahrami, 1999:63). There is also a disconnect between grammatical speech and grammatical writing but here is where right wing grammarians, who usually know nothing whatever about language, intrude their unwanted selves into the discussion by insisting that white middle class matrons, to take just one group, speak "correct English" or "proper English" as if "correct English" is like "correct answer" in an addition problem or "proper English" is like "proper dress." The reality is that people of different regions, different races, different genders, different ages, different social classes, and different language backgrounds (first vs. third generation immigrants, for instance) abide by different grammatical rules and calling one way of talking "good" and another "bad" is purely and simply the result of” correct" or "good" ways of talking (as many "correct" and "good" ways as there are different ways of talking, as a matter of fact), but how we write English is an entirely different matter. It is of very great importance that everyone learn to write and spell (ugh!) a single kind of English for only if we do that can we hope to communicate with others within the borders of USA, as well as outside.{(Fishman,1972:27) as cited in Coupland et.al.(eds.),1997}.

2. Ellipsis and Elision. Ellipsis is the omission of one or more words from a text, which the hearer or reader can recover or guess from the context (from Greek word for ‘ defective’)(Verdonk,2010:118). Elision is the omission of a certain sound, vowel or consonant, from a sentence. Sometimes the whole syllable may be omitted or apart of the sentence is omitted and can be understood from the previous sentence. Sometimes weak forms may be elided like ‘and’ or ‘of’, and the like. As Crystal (1996:107) defines ‘ellipsis’ as a term used in grammatical analysis to refer to a sentence where, for reasons of economy, emphasis or style, a part of the structure has been omitted, which is recoverable from a scrutiny of the context . Traditional grammars talks here of an element being ‘understood’, but linguistic analyses tend to constrain the notion more, emphasizing the need for ‘elided’(or ellipted) parts of the sentence to be unambiguously specifiable (e.g. A: Where are you going? / B: To town—that means I am going to town.). Also, he defines ‘elision’ as a term used in phonology to refer to the omission of sounds in connected speech. Both consonants and vowels may be affected, and sometimes whole syllables may be elided. Unstressed grammatical words, such as’ and’ and ‘of ‘, are particularly prone to be elided, as when the ‘f’ is dropped in ‘cup of tea’ (cf. cuppa tea), or the ‘a’ and ‘d’ are dropped in “boys ‘n’ girls”. Quirk et.al.(1972:82) see ellipsis as a kind of reduction of expression. They add that ellipsis, whereby elements of a sentence which are predictable from context can be omitted. Ellipsis obviously resembles the substitution of pro-forms in its abbreviatory function, and both processes will be considered in this grammar under the common heading of reduction as means of avoiding redundancy of expression. Quirk et al (1985:883) say that "Ellipsis may be more strictly described as grammatical omission in contrast to other kinds of omission in language. The phonological loss (aphaeresis) of a syllable in the familiar form of because (often spelled' cos), the clipping of words (flu from influenza) may well be regarded as a process of this kind: the omission is describable in terms of phonological units (syllables) rather than in terms of morphological units (morphemes) or grammatical units (words). Swan (1980:174) says that "we often leave out words to avoid repetition or in other cases when the meaning can be understood without them". She (2003:84) adds that "we often leave out words when the meaning is clear without them"( As Cited in Swan, 2003). For Martin(2003:36) ellipsis refers to resources for omitting a clause, or some part of a clause or group, in contexts where it can be assumed. In English conversation, rejoinders are often made depending through omissions of this kind: Did they win? - Yes, they did.(as cited in Schiffrin et.al., 2003).

3. Accents and Dialects. The distinction between accent and dialect is related to the way the linguists look at the accent as a result of regionally or socially. As Crystal(1996:2) defines accent as the cumulative auditory effect of those features of a person’s pronunciation which identify where he is from, regionally or socially. The linguistics literature emphasizes that the term refers to pronunciation only, and is thus distinct from dialect which refers to grammar and vocabulary as well regional accents can relate to any locale, including both rural and urban communities within a country (e.g., ‘West Country’, ‘Liverpool’) as well as national groups speaking the same language (e.g.,’ American’, Australian) and our impression of other languages (‘foreign accent’, ‘Slavic accent’) social accents relate to the cultural and educational background of the speaker…. In Britain, the best example is the regionally neutral accent associated with a publicschool education, and of the related professional domains, such as Civil Service, the law courts, the Court and the BBC—hence the labels ‘ Queen’s English’, ‘BBC English’, and the like. But, ‘dialect’ is a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, identified by a particular set of words and grammatical structures. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or accent. Any language with a reasonably large number of speakers will develop dialects, especially if there are geographical barriers separating groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social class. One dialect may predominate as the official or standard form of the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down. The distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ seems obvious: dialects are subdivisions of languages (ibid: 92). Whereas Quirk et.al.(1973:16-17) says that varieties to regional have a well-established label both in popular and technical use: dialects. Geographical dispersion is in fact the classic basis for linguistic variation, and in the course of time, with poor communications and relative remoteness, such dispersion results in dialects becoming so distinct that we regard them as different languages. This latter stage was long ago reached with the Germanic dialects that are now Dutch, English, German, Swedish, etc, but with the dialects of English that have resulted from the regional separation of communities within the British Isles and elsewhere in the world. Regional variation seems to be realized predominantly in phonology. That is a different dialect can be recognized from the speaker’s pronunciation or accent before they sociolinguists notice that the vocabulary is also distinctive. Grammatical variation tends to be less extensive and certainly less obtrusive. Atchison (1987:104) sees dialects as associated with a particular geographical area, such as the Geordie and Cockney dialects of English, which are spoken in Tyneside and London respectively. The term ‘dialect’ refers to far greater differences than mere pronunciation. But the term dialect is often confused with the word accent. An accent refers only to a difference in pronunciation. A Scotsman and a Londoner are likely to speak English with different accents. But if the underlying system and the vocabulary are the same, they will be speaking the same dialect. In fact, although a considerable number of local accents are still found in Britain, dialects are dying out, due to the influence of education, radio, television and internet. Dialectal variation in relation to what part of the country people come from is probably the most well known kind of language variation. However, there is a tendency for many people to equate dialect with accent (phonetic variation). It is often possible for anyone to infer roughly where someone comes from by listening to their accents (Short, 1996:81). Spolsky (1998:27) asserts the same thing concerning the term dialect by saying that a variety of a language used recognizably in a specific region or (a social dialect) by a specific social class. He adds that there are two principles underlying social accounts of dialect variation. The first is that all languages change over time, as new words are added to deal with new concepts or as contact with other languages and ‘phonetic drift’ leads to modifications in phonology. The second is that people who communicate with each other tend to speak similarly. The longer the groups are isolated, the more their varieties will have changed.

6.Contractions in Casual dialogues.

In casual spoken forms there are a number of phonological contraction processes in which a sequence of words is contracted, or reduced, to a shorter sequence. In all cases contracted forms conform to the phonological rules of English. These informal contractions are not used in written English (unless the writer highlighting the informality of the text), nor used when speaking on formal occasions. However, they are used extensively in conversations among friends. Therefore, it is helpful to learn them in order to understand the speech and to be able to respond to them in conversation with the appropriate level of formality. For example:

• aint= am not/ are not/ is not/ isn’t - I ain’t sure. - You ain’t my boss. - Ain’t= has not/hasn’t/ have not /haven’t - I ain’t done it. - She ain’t seen it yet. (Weinstein, 2010: 13) These two examples are also linked to a specific dialect that is considered by many Americans to be inferior. Considering the various contractions of forms of the verb ‘to be’ (as well as other auxiliary verbs) are reduced in casual speech when it is unstressed. As Akmajian et.al.(2010: 283) say that deletion or contraction of verb to be happens quite generally in the informal style in all dialects of American English. Also the deletions or contractions happen in the tag-questions, as in: -You have been sneaking to the movies again, ain’t ya? -Been sneaking to the movies again, haven’t you? -You are getting pretty excited, aren’t you? -Getting pretty excited, aren’t you? (Weinstein, 2010: 14) The subject of the main sentence may be deleted under thefollowing conditions in tag questions: a. There is a tag. b. If the main sentence contains an auxiliary, it must be contracted onto the subject. But this is not the case with some auxiliaries like ‘could’: -It could get on your nerves, couldn’t it. It is not possible to say (*It’d).

• cantcha=can’t you -Cantcha stay a while?

• atcha= at you -Here’s lookin atcha!

•dija=did you -Dija leave the door open?

•dijer=did your -Dijer car start?

•doin= doing -I’m doin fine. -Whatcha doin?

•dontcha= don’t you -Why dontcha quit?

•dunno= don’t know -I dunno what’s goin on.

A well-known difference between formal and informal language styles in English is that the informal style has a greater amount of abbreviation, shortening, contraction, and deletion. So, the speakers tend to use the short form of expressing their attention in casual speech than in formal speech. Compare the formal “Would you care for some coffee?” with the informal “Want some coffee?” The formal style is often redundant and verbose, whereas the informal style is brief, to the point, and grammatically streamlined ( Akmajian et.al., 2010:285).

•gedda= get a -Gedda grip!

•getcha=get you -I’m gonna getcha to come with me someday.

•gimme= give me -Gimme your money. -Don’t gimme that rubbish. -Cantcha gimme a hand?

(Weinstein, 2010: 32)

Another informal style of English involves abbreviated questions. The data show that deletion of the verb ‘be’ and the subject ‘you’ is possible. Note that the subject ‘you’ cannot be deleted unless the auxiliary verb is deleted as well. The verb in question is a contractible verb, just as in the case of Tag-Controlled Deletion. -John a professor or something?(=Is John a professor or something?) -(you) gonna leave soon?(=Are you going to leave soon?)

•godda=(have) got a -I’ve godda gun. -She hasn’t godda penny? -Have you godda car?

•godda=(have)got to -I’ve godda go now. -We godda do that. -Have they godda work?

•gonna=going to -Nothing’s gonna change my opinion. -I’m not gonna tell you. -What are you gonna do? - *Have been sneaking to the movies again, haven’t you? -* Are getting pretty excited, aren’t you? -You’ve been sneaking to the movies again. -You’re not ready to swim fifty laps. (ibid:44) If the subject of the sentence can be deleted only if the auxiliary verb is contracted onto it, sentences with (*) will never occur: the auxiliary will always be deleted along with the subject.

• Lemme=let me -Lemme go!

•letcha= let you -Why don’t they letcha go and rest?

•Musta= must have -I musta cost him an arm and a leg.

Sometimes the deletions or contractions are not just with a complete form but with the part of that form. In the first example the deletion is with the /t/ sound; whereas, the deletion is with the pronoun “you” as in second and third examples, but with the last one with have as /a/ sound as with you=/a/ sound . This means both ‘you’ and ‘have’ are contracted into /a/ sound.

•Nope=no -Nape!

•Ya=you -Who saw ya?

•Yeah=yes -Yeah!

•yep=yes -yep!

•uh-huh=yes - Uh-huh!

The contractions with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are very clear with changing and adding to them other sounds, like/p/and /h/ sounds . It is their way of pronouncing ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Also look at the contraction of the pronoun ‘you’ here. It is different from the contractions of the same pronoun in other positions.

•supposta=supposed to -You’re not supposed to be here!

•use-ta= used to -I use-ta wake up early.

•wanna= want to -I wanna go home.

•wanna= want a -I wanna book.

The contractions with ‘used to’ and ‘supposed to’ is the same contracted sounds at the end /ta/, but the contracted form with ‘want to’ is different from them. The problem is with the two contracted forms of ‘want to’ becomes ‘wanna’ and ‘want a’ becomes ‘wanna’. This means there will be the same contracted form used by people.

•Whadarya= what are you -Whadarya doin?

•Whadaya=what do you -whadaya wanna know?

•Whatcha=what are you -Whatcha gonna do?

•Whatcha=what have you -whatcha got there?

•Whassup=what is up -Whassup?

•Wontcha=won’t you -Why wontcha come over?

The contractions here are like the contractions in tag-questions. The subject and the verb cannot be recognized, and they may have the same contracted forms as in: “What are you”, with “What do you” and “What are you”, with “What have you”.

Contractions with "you"

Contractions with "have"

Contractions with "of"

Contractions with "to"

Other informal contractions

CHAPTER II

We conducted an opinion poll among the pupils of 8-11 forms in our lyceum. 78 schoolchildren took part in it. The results of the poll show that the pupils know what the contractions are, when it’s proper to use informal ones and can give examples of the use of informal contractions in song lyrics. Let’s see what we found out.

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