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Trisyllabic laxing, or trisyllabic shortening, is any of three processes in English in which tense vowels (long vowels or diphthongs) become lax (short monophthongs) if they are followed by two or more syllables, at least the first of which is unstressed, for example, grateful vs gratitude, profound vs profundity.
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 ...
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 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 phonology, syncope (/ ˈ s ɪ ŋ k ə p i /; from Ancient Greek: συγκοπή, romanized: sunkopḗ, lit. 'cutting up') is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.
Only a general overview of the more important changes is given here; for a full list, see the Proto-Germanic article. Unstressed word-final /a/, /e/ and /o/ were lost. Early PGmc *barta > late PGmc *bart "you carried (sg)". Word-final /m/ became /n/. Word-final /n/ was then lost after unstressed syllables with nasalization of the preceding vowel.
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending -ilis are mostly pronounced with a full vowel in BrE / aɪ l / but a reduced vowel or syllabic L in AmE / əl / (e.g. fertile rhymes with fur tile in BrE but with furtle in AmE). AmE will (unlike BrE, except when indicated with B2) have a reduced last vowel:
All unstressed vowels came to be shortened, and many texts only show a clear distinction in this context between three vowels, which can be phonemically transcribed as /ɑ e u/. [112] Even this reduced three-way contrast was lost by Middle English, and the merger of unstressed /ɑ e u/ seems in fact to have occurred before the end of the Old ...