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"Mid central vowel" and "schwa" do not always mean the same thing, and the symbol ə is often used for any obscure vowel, regardless of its precise quality. For instance, the unstressed English vowel transcribed ə and called "schwa" is a central unrounded vowel that can be close-mid [ ɘ ] , mid [ə] or open-mid [ ɜ ] , depending on the ...
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
The effect may be dependent on lexical stress (for example, the unstressed first syllable of the word photographer contains a schwa / f ə ˈ t ɒ ɡ r ə f ər /, whereas the stressed first syllable of photograph does not /ˈfoʊtəˌɡræf-ɡrɑːf/), or on prosodic stress (for example, the word of is pronounced with a schwa when it is ...
Cardinal vowel chart showing peripheral (white) and central (blue) vowel space, based on the chart in Collins & Mees (2003:227). Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something ...
In pronunciation handbooks and dictionaries it is now common to use the symbol /i/ to cover both possibilities. In a number of words where contemporary RP has an unstressed syllable with schwa /ə/, older pronunciations had /ɪ/, for instance, the final vowel in the following: kindness, doubtless, witness, witless, toilet, fortunate. [106]
In non-rhotic varieties with the shift, it also encompasses the unstressed syllable of letters with the stressed variant of /ɪ/ being realized with a schwa-like quality . As a result, the vowels in kit /kət/ , lid /ləd/ and miss /məs/ belong to the same phoneme as the unstressed vowel in balance /ˈbæləns/ .
Getting back to the question of stressed versus unstressed syllables: The article tenseness says "Since in Germanic languages, lax vowels generally only occur in closed syllables, they are also called checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels as they can occur at the end of a syllable." There's nothing here limiting it to ...
The first type occurs in a stressed syllable before a fortis consonant, so that e.g. bet [ˈbɛt] has a vowel that is shorter than the one in bed [ˈbɛˑd]. Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in keychain /ˈkiː.tʃeɪn/) are not affected by this rule. [1] Rhythmic clipping occurs in polysyllabic words.