A comprehensive empirical analysis of the major truncatory patterns in English. Complete with a critical evaluation of pertinent theories in the light of known empirical facts. Contains a broad coverage of structural aspects, including segmental, phonotactic, and suprasegmental.

Linguistic academics and speech therapists will find here the first modern book-length empirical study and theoretical account of English truncatory processes. On the basis of a corpus comprising some 3000 derivatives, the book provides a systematic investigation of the structural properties of six different patterns of English name truncation and word clipping. All patterns are shown to be unique in terms of the structural requirements that they impose on their outputs.