Social, geographical, and register variation in Dutch: From written MOGELIJK to spoken MOK
K. Keune, Mirjam Ernestus, Roeland van Hout, R. Harald Baayen · Radboud Repository (Radboud University) · 2005
spontaneous speech words are often pronounced in reduced form. Some words are reduced to such an extent that an orthographic transcription would be very different from the orthographic norm. An example from Dutch is the word MOGE-LIJK ('poss-ible'), which can be pronounced not only as MO.GE.LEK but also as MO.GEK, MO.LEK, or even as MOK. Strongly reduced word forms are difficult to interpret without syntactic or semantic context. When speakers of Dutch are presented with the word mok in isolation, they tend not to be able to assign a meaning to this string of phonemes. It is only when the word is embedded in a sentence that its meaning becomes available. Interestingly, listeners who understood the meaning of MOK tend to think they heard the full, unreduced form MOGELIJK. A central question in the research on the