Prosiopesis

Prosiopesis (from Ancient Greek προσιώπησις prosiṓpēsis 'becoming silent') is a term coined by Otto Jespersen for pronouncing a word or phrase without its initial sounds. Jespersen introduced the idea in Negation in English and Other Languages (1917):^[1]

. . . the phenomenon for which I venture to coin the term of prosiopesis (the opposite of what has been termed of old aposiopesis): the speaker begins to articulate, or thinks he begins to articulate, but produces no audible sound (either for want of expiration, or because he does not put his vocal chords in the proper position) till one or two syllables after the beginning of what he intended to say. The phenomenon is particularly frequent, and may become a regular speech-habit, in the case of certain set phrases, but may spread from these to other parts of the language.

Among the English examples Jespersen gives are (Good) morning, (I'm a)fraid not, and (The) fact is; among the French examples, (Est-ce) convenu?, (Par)faitement, and (Je ne me) rappelle plus.

He also introduces it in The Philosophy of Grammar (1924): "[P]rosiopesis . . . sometimes becomes habitual in certain stock exclamations like Thank you | [German] danke | [German] bitte | Bless you | Confound it! Cf. also Hope I'm not boring you."^[2]

This is similar to aposiopesis, where the ending of a sentence is deliberately excluded. David Crystal writes, "In rhetorical terminology, an elision in word-INITIAL position was known as aphaeresis or prosiopesis, in word-MEDIAL position was known as syncope, and in word-FINAL position as apocope."^[3] (Richard A. Lanham similarly defines aphaeresis more narrowly than Jespersen defines prosiopesis, a term that Lanham does not mention.^[4])

Other synonyms include aphesis, procope,^[5] and truncation.^[6]

Prosiopesis and aposiopesis are studied as sources of interjections.^[7]

References

^ Jespersen, Otto (1917). Negation in English and Other Languages. Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser I, 5. Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst og søn. p. 6. OCLC 457568567 – via Internet Archive.
^ Jespersen, Otto (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin. pp. 142, 310. OCLC 19939152 – via Internet Archive.
^ Crystal, David (2008-06-23). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (6th ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-5297-6.
^ Lanham, Richard A. (1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for Students of English Literature (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07669-9.
^ Bussmann, Hadumod (1998). Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 0-203-98005-0. (Also ISBN 0-415-02225-8 and ISBN 0-415-20319-8.)
^ Radford, Andrew (2009). Analysing English Sentences: A Minimalist Approach. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 483. ISBN 978-0-521-51697-6. Truncation is an operation by which a sentence is shortened by omitting one or more unstressed words at the beginning. Also ISBN 978-0-521-73191-1
^ Nishikawa, Mayumi (15 October 2004). "Secondary interjections in English". 9th International Pragmatics Conference. International Pragmatics Association. Archived from the original on 25 April 2005.