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Stress. Strong and weak forms. Unstressed vocalism

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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 (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced" (or sometimes with a syllabic consonant as the syllable nucleus rather than a vowel). Various phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.

Some monosyllabic English function words have a weak form with a reduced vowel, used when the word has no prosodic stress, and a phonemically distinct strong form with a full vowel, used when the word is stressed (and as the citation form or isolation form when a word is mentioned standing alone). In the case of many such words the strong form is also used when the word comes at the end of a sentence or phrase.

An example of such a word is the modal verb can. When appearing unstressed within a sentence and governing a verb (as in I can do it), the weak form /kən/ (or just /kn/, with a syllabic consonant n) is used. However the strong form /kæn/ is used:

· when the word is stressed: I don't have to do it, but I can do it

· when the word is phrase-final, i.e. without a governed verb: we won't be doing it, but they can if they want

· when the word is referred to in isolation: The verb "can" is one of the English modals.

In the case of most words with such alternative forms, the weak form is much more common (since it is relatively rare for function words to receive prosodic stress). This is particularly true of theEnglish articles the, a, an, whose strong forms are used within normal sentences only on the rare occasions when definiteness or indefiniteness is being emphasized: Did you find the cat? I found a [eɪ] cat. (i.e. maybe not the one you were referring to). Notice that the weak form of the is typically [ði] before a vowel-initial word (the apple) but [ðə] before a consonant-initial word (the pear), although this distinction is being lost in the United States.[17] A similar distinction is sometimes made with to: to Oxford [tu] vs. to Cambridge [tə].

The exact set of words that have weak forms depends on dialect and speaker; the following is a list of the chief words of this type in Received Pronunciation:

a, am, an, and, are, as, at, be, been, but, can, could, do, does, for, from, had, has, have, he, her, him, his, just, me, must, of, shall, she, should, some, than, that (as conjunction), the, them, there, to, us, was, we, were, who, would, you

In most of the above words the weak form contains schwa, or a syllabic consonant in the case of those ending /l/, /m/ or /n/. However in be, he, me, she, we, been, him the vowel may be the reduced form of /ɪ/, or else [i]; and in do, who, you it may be the reduced form of /ʊ/, or [u]. (For the and to, see above.) These various sounds are described in the Reduced vowels section above.

Note that the weak form of that is used only for the conjunction or relative pronoun (I said that you can; The man that you saw), and not for the demonstrative pronoun or adjective (Put that down; I like that colour).

Another common word with a reduced form is our, but this is derived through smoothing rather than vowel reduction.

Other words that have weak forms in many varieties of English include your (weakly pronounced as [jə], or [jɚ] in rhotic accents), and my (pronounced [mɨ] or [mi]). These are sometimes given theeye dialect spellings yer and me.

In highly formal registers with exaggeratedly careful enunciation, weak forms may be avoided. An example is singing, where strong forms may be used almost exclusively, apart (normally) from a, although weak forms may be used more frequently as tempo increases and note-values shorten.[ citation needed ]

The vowel reduction in weak forms may be accompanied by other sound changes, such as h-dropping, consonant elision, and assimilation. For example and may reduce to [ən] or just the syllabic consonant [n], or [ŋ] by assimiliation with a following velar, as in lock and key. Compare also definite article reduction.

The ' em [əm] form of them is derived from the otherwise obsolete pronoun hem, an unusual form of suppletion.

The homonymy resulting from the use of some of the weak forms can lead to confusion in writing; the identity of the weak forms of have and of sometimes leads to misspellings such as "would of", "could of", etc. for would have, could have, etc.

English weak forms are distinct from the clitic forms found in some languages, which are words fused with an adjacent word, as in Italian mangiarla, "to-eat-it".

 

2. English Phraseology. Types of word - groups. Different approaches to the study of phraseological units.

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’. Instead, the phrase has a conventionalized meaning referring to any auction where, instead of rising, the prices fall. The basic units of analysis in phraseology are often referred to as phrasemes or phraseological units. Phraseological units are (according to Prof. Kunin A.V.)[ citation needed ] stable word-groups with partially or fully transferred meanings ("to kick the bucket", “Greek gift”, “drink till all's blue”, “drunk as a fiddler (drunk as a lord, as a boiled owl)”, “as mad as a hatter (as a march hare)”). According to Rosemarie Gläser, a phraseological unit is a lexicalized, reproducible bilexemic or polylexemic word group in common use, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations, and may have an emphatic or intensifying function in a text.[8]

 

 

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