  We look for evidence of tidal stripping in elliptical galaxies through the
analysis of homogeneous CCD data corresponding to a sample of 228 elliptical
galaxies belonging to 24 clusters of galaxies at $0.015<z<0.080$. We
investigate departures from the standard magnitude-isophotal size relation, as
a function of environmental (cluster-centric distance, local galaxy density)
and structural (cluster velocity dispersion, Bautz-Morgan type) properties. We
find that, for any particular galaxy luminosity, the ellipticals in the inner
and denser regions of the clusters are about 5% smaller than those in the outer
regions, which is in good agreement with the finding of Strom & Strom (1978)
based on photographic photometry. The null hypothesis (ie., galaxy sizes are
independent of the cluster-centric distance or density) is rejected at a
significance level of better than 99.7%. Numericals models of Aguilar & White
(1986) predict that tidal stripping can lead to changes in the whole structure
of ellipticals producing shrinkage and brightening of the galaxy, qualitatively
consistent with our measurements and also with the findings of Trujillo et al.
(2002), that more centrally concentrated ellipticals populate denser regions.
Our observational results can be interpreted as evidence for stripping of stars
from ellipticals in the central/denser regions of clusters, contributing to the
intra-cluster light observed in these structures.
