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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 ...
In hiatus, unstressed front vowels become /j/, and unstressed back vowels become /w/, as in /ˈfiːlius, ˈsapuiː/ > /ˈfiːljus, ˈsapwiː/. [14] The same process also affects stressed front and back vowels in hiatus if they are antepenultimate (in the third-to-last syllable of a word).
In the approach used by the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Wells [81] claims that consonants syllabify with the preceding rather than following vowel when the preceding vowel is the nucleus of a more salient syllable, with stressed syllables being the most salient, reduced syllables the least, and full unstressed vowels ("secondary stress ...
In particular, vowels in unstressed syllables may have a more central (or "neutral") articulation, and those in stressed syllables have a more peripheral articulation. Stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes, the difference is minimal between the acoustic signals of stressed and those of unstressed ...
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 ...
Inflectional evidence suggests that occurred first when the following word began with a vowel. A century or so later, unstressed /ə/ also dropped in the plural genitive ending -es (spelled -s in Modern English) and the past ending -ed. The changes steadily effaced most inflectional endings: OE mētan → ME meete(n) → LME /meːt/ → NE meet ...
Reduction and loss of unstressed vowels: Remaining unstressed vowels merged into /ə/. Starting around 1400 AD, /ə/ is lost in final syllables. Initial clusters /hɾ/, /hl/, /hn/ were reduced by loss of /h/. Voiced fricatives became independent phonemes through borrowing and other sound changes. /sw/ before back vowel becomes /s/; /mb/ becomes ...
Velar [k ɣ sk] can be found before unstressed back vowels in words such as dīcas, plegode, æscas, [81] whereas palatal [tʃ j ʃ] can be found before unstressed back vowels in words that originally contained an etymological *j or *i after the consonant, such as sēċan, wierġan, wȳsċan from Proto-Germanic *sōkijaną, *wargijaną ...