Syncope (phonology)


In phonology, syncope is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. It is found both in synchronic analysis of languages and diachronics. Its opposite, whereby sounds are added, is epenthesis.

Synchronic analysis

Synchronic analysis studies linguistic phenomena at one moment of a language's history, usually the present. In modern languages, syncope occurs in inflection, poetry, and informal speech.

Inflections

In languages such as Irish, the process of inflection can cause syncope:
If the present root form in Irish is the result of diachronic syncope, synchronic syncope for inflection is prevented.

As a poetic device

Sounds may be removed from the interior of a word as a rhetorical or poetic device: for embellishment or for the sake of the meter.
Various sorts of colloquial reductions might be called "syncope" or "compression".
Contractions in English such as "didn't" or "can't" are typically cases of syncope.
In historical phonology, the term "syncope" is often limited to the loss of an unstressed vowel, in effect collapsing the syllable that contained it: trisyllabic Latin calidus develops as bisyllabic caldo in several Romance languages.

Loss of any sound

A syncope rule has been identified in Tonkawa, an extinct American Indian language in which the second vowel of a word was deleted unless it was adjacent to a consonant cluster or a final consonant.