A Phonological Analysis Of Elision Found In Sza’s Selected Songs In ‘SOS’ Album

Abstract

Nowadays, songs have become the media that helps others to learn and improve their English skill and to influence people’s pronunciation. In songs, singers tend to not pronounce several sounds in words based on the conditions and their purposes. The deletion of the sounds in phonology is called elision. The nature of elision may be stated quite simply: under certain circumstances sounds disappear. One might express this in more technical language by saying that in certain circumstances a phoneme may be realised as zero, or have zero realisation (Roach, 1991). Thus, this study aims to find out the kinds of phonological elision that occur in SZA’s selected songs in “SOS” album. The data was taken from the speech sound that is pronounced by the singer SZA in her selected songs entitled “Open Arms”, “I Hate U”, and “Good Days”. The data were collected through observing the content and note taking technique by listening to the pronounced words in the songs. The findings are divided into three. There are vowel elision, consonant elision, and syllable elision. In vowel elision, there are two cases found, the first one is /ə/ (2 data) and second case is /ɪ/ (10 data). In consonant elision there are eight cases found, the first one is /t/ (17 data), second case /d/ (10 data), third and fourth cases /p/ and /r/ (2 data respectively), and fifth to seventh cases /v/, /z/, and /n/ are found only in one data respectively. In syllable elision there are three cases found , they are /bɪ/, /ən/, and /ɒm/.