What is the name for the process which turned "iced cream" into "ice cream"?
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Chapters
00:00 What Is The Name For The Process Which Turned &Quot;Iced Cream&Quot; Into &Quot;Ice Cream&Quot;?
00:42 Answer 1 Score 10
01:04 Accepted Answer Score 31
02:00 Thank you
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Tags
#etymology #nouns #history #participles
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 31
I don't think there is a specific term for the loss of -ed in these contexts. Rather, what you have is the interplay of a few different general trends.
The first factor is simply phonological. Iced cream, pronounced very deliberately, has a [stkr] cluster in the middle. In rapid speech, this is going to be reduced to [skr] anyway. The same is true of every other example you gave: if pronounced with the -ed, they contain difficult consonant clusters which are likely to be reduced in speech. This is known as elision.
The second factor is that English has a highly productive compounding process, which allows you to take any combination of two nouns and stick them together as a new lexical item. Once the phonological elision has taken place, it's immediately tempting to reanalyze the phonological string as a compound word rather than a noun phrase. So now ice cream is considered a single lexical item, and has the characteristic first-syllable stress of lexicalized compounds. This is a combination of reanalysis and compounding.