Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English

Shortening processes are increasingly productive in Present-day English (PDE), generating 9–15% of the new words in the language. They are therefore a valuable source of information on the interaction of production, perception, prosodic well-formedness, morphological patterning, and sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of word-formation. One type of shortening, word clipping, is considered unpredictable by some scholars (Durkin 2009: 116; Don 2014: 27), while others (Plag 2003; Lappe 2007; Berg