Ellipsisin Urdu Content Words

Abstract

Presently, this work deals with thephonological rulesforunderstanding the role of ellipsis inre syllabification of Urdu content words, at larger scale, in speech of Pakistani Urdu speakers.The 10 hours audiocorpushas become the source of motivation for the current study due to itsmultiple pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016), (Farooq & Mahmood, 2020). The annotated speech data has multiple information i.e., same parts-of speech (POS), spellings and meaningsbut different pronunciations which ultimately becomes the cause of re-syllabificationat different places and contexts.Therefore, that annotated speech corpus is used as baseline of this research (Mumtaz, et al., 2014), (Habib, Hijab, Hussain, & Adeeba, 2014) but the selected words’ list includes only those words which have different pronunciations occurred due to phoneme ellipsis. Later this list has been shared and asked to record by 29 native Urdu speakers in Pakistan. Thus, data analysis has confirmed different reasons for causingellipsis in Urdu; (i) contextual variations, (ii)inter-speaker variations, (iii) stress variations, (iv) multilingual effect, etc. All these variations become the reasons for alternative pronunciations. It is also confirmed that alternative pronunciations are present in the speech data of all speakers but a speaker can use a single pronunciation at a time. Therefore, all different pronunciations have attained the status of alternative/multiple pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016) in Urdu in Pakistan