Proximity and Reduction

Abstract

It has been argued in Park (l977a, 1977b, 1980, 1981, and 1982) that proximate repetition of linguistic elements is maximally constrained. It has further been shown that such proximate repetition is usually avoided by means of reduction, which takes the form of either deletion or replacement. By way of introduction, we will briefly discuss the constraint on proximate repetition (Park (1982)). This constraint says that proximate repetition of identical or nearly identical linguistic elements is maximally avoided because such repetition tends to render the expression in question awkward.