LINGUISTIC PORTFOLIO VOLUMEN 1 | Page 33

Normal speech

These two processes of assimilation and elision occur in everyone’s normal speech and

could be regarded as some type of sloppiness or laziness in speaking. In fact, consistently avoiding the regular patterns of assimilation and elision used in a language would result in extremely artificial-sounding talk. The point of investigating these phonological processes is not to arrive at a set of rules about how a language should be pronounced, but to try to come to an understanding of the regularities and patterns which underlie the actual use of sounds in language.