Reduction
Linguistic reductions are lost sounds in words, which happens in spoken English. For instance, "going to" changes to "gonna". The most common reductions are contractions. Most contractions are reductions of 'not'. For instance, "cannot" becomes "can't". Many contractions are reductions between a subject and a verb. For instance, "He is..." becomes "He's..."
Some reductions are known to language learners, such as the reduction of a verb and "to". Examples are "going to" becoming "gonna" and "want to" becoming "wanna". Linguistic reductions are part of natural English and should not be considered slang or improper.
Speakers can produce utterances with more or less articulatory detail or even completely omit certain words, while still conveying the same message. Similar reduction exists at higher levels of linguistic representation, allowing—in the appropriate context—the omission of entire words or even phrases without loss of (near) meaning-equivalence. Such reduction lets speakers adjust the amount of information they provide in a given span of time or amount of signal. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides an empirical summary of psycholinguistics research on reduction and omission across levels of linguistic representation. We focus on the relation between signal reduction and the predictability of the message components encoded by that signal: speakers tend to reduce the signal of predictable message components. The second part of this chapter discusses possible explanations of this correlation. One type of explanation focuses on the attentional and memory pressures inherent to linguistic encoding. Another type of explanation focuses on the role of communicative goals in linguistic encoding. Finally, we discuss to what extent reduction is best explained in terms of changes to linguistic representations or biases operating during online language production.
Jaeger, T. F., & Buz, E. (2017). Signal reduction and linguistic encoding. The handbook of psycholinguistics, 38-81.
Simple English Wikipedia, (2021). Linguistic reduction. Retrieved from: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_reduction