List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.
Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, Richard. Definition and Examples of Epenthesis. In the Gallo-Romance languages , however, a prop vowel was added, e. Examples of this kind are common in many Slavic languages , which showed a preference for open vowel-final syllables in earlier times. The same thing occurs in the song Umbrella. Epenthesis often breaks up a consonant cluster or vowel sequence that is not permitted by the phonotactics of a language.
Sporadic cases can be less obviously motivated, however, such as warsh 'wash' with an extra r in some varieties of American English or Hamtramck being pronounced 'Hamtramick' as if there were an extra i. Regular or semiregular epenthesis commonly occurs in languages which use affixes. Vocalic epenthesis typically occurs when words are borrowed from a language that has consonant clusters or syllable codas that are not permitted in the borrowing language, though this is not always the cause.
Languages use various vowels for this purpose, though schwa is quite common when it is available. For example,. Epenthesis most often occurs within unfamiliar or complex consonant clusters. Epenthesis is sometimes used for humorous or childlike effect. For example, the cartoon character Yogi Bear says "pic-a-nic basket" for "picnic basket. Some apparent occurrences of epenthesis, however, have a separate cause: the pronunciation of nuclear as [ sic ] arises out of analogy with other - cular words binocular , particular , etc.
In Finnish , there are two epenthetic vowels and two nativization vowels. The second one is [e] , connecting stems that have historically been consonant stems to their case endings, e. In standard Finnish, consonant clusters may not be broken by epenthetic vowels; foreign words undergo consonant deletion rather than addition of vowels e.
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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about About Related Articles close popup. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Introduction Use of the term epenthesis implies an input-output mapping relationship in which the output contains more segmental material than the input.
Theoretical Overview To describe epenthesis within a given language, it is necessary to adopt a particular theoretical framework; most fundamentally: is epenthesis taken to be a rewrite rule, as exemplified in Chomsky and Halle , or the result of the interaction of a set of ranked constraints, as proposed in Prince and Smolensky ?
As in the above examples, epenthesis typically affects clusters that occur in s yllable-initial position. However, clusters in syllable-final position can also be affected but this is much more limited, e. Epenthesis 2 August Graham Williamson.
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