Contracted Word

A Contracted Word is a word form that is composed of two or more word forms with shortened morphs.

• Context:
  • It can be:
    • an Abbreviation.
    • an Acronym.
    • a ...
  • It is the output of a Word Contraction Rule.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • Acronyms:
    • “I.B.M.” ← “International Business Machines”.
    • “UNICEF” ← “United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund”.
    • “USA” ← “United States of America”.
    • lol” ← “laugh out loud”.
  • Abbreviations:
    • “ltd.” ← “limited”
    • “vs.” ← “versus”
    • “etc.” ← “et cetera”
    • “Dr.” ← “Doctor”
  • Inflected Preposition.
    • “conmigo” ← “con mi -go”, a Spanish Word (~ "with me").
  • Other??
    • “I've” ← “I have”.
    • “it's” ← “it is”.
    • “let's” ← “let us” (note that the meaning/usage changes on this contraction: let's go vs. let us be free. see Imperative Mood).
    • “ain't” ← “am not”.
    • “wouldn't've” ← “would not have”.
    • “auf’m Auto” ← “auf dem Auto” (~ “on the car”), an Inflicted Preposition.
    • “weil’s” ← “weil es” (~ “because it”), an Inflected Preposition.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “its”, the Possessive Form of it: “The dog chewed its toy”.
• See: Hyphenated Compound.

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References

2009

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar)
  • In current English usage, contraction is the shortening of a word, syllable, or word group by omission of internal letters. [1] In traditional grammar, contraction can denote the formation of a new word from one word or a group of words, for example, by elision. This often occurs in rendering a common sequence of words or, as in French, in maintaining a flowing sound.
  • In strict analysis, contractions should not be confused with abbreviations or acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.

2006

• (Kabak & Schiering, 2006) ⇒ Bariş Kabak, and René Schiering. (2006). “The Phonology and Morphology of Function Word Contractions in German.” In: Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 9.
  • NOTES: It uses the term Function Word (rather then Grammatical Word and defines Function Word as a Free Morpheme) that mainly (though not exclusively) conveys Grammatical Information and Grammatical Relations such as Determiners, Adpositions, Pronouns, and Complementizers.
  • NOTES: It describes the Function Word Contraction Process for the German Language (and some English Language.
  • NOTES: Presents the German examples of Contraction:
    • “auf’m Auto” < “auf dem Auto” (~ “on the car”)
    • “weil’s” < “weil es” (~ “because it”).
  • QUOTE: From the viewpoint of morphology, the case of function words such as prepositions fusing with other function words constitutes an instructive case for understanding the emergence of inflectional morphology. When determiners, for instance, fuse with prepositions, the complex grammatical construction carries various grammatical categories such as definiteness, number, gender, etc. The research question for morphology thus remains: how do such function words acquire grammatical categories that are normally attributed to lexical words? The fusion phenomenon we observe in various dialects of German provides us with a unique way to track the development of inflectional morphology from simple cliticization in the course of grammaticalization.

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