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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 ...
G-dropping – reduction of the final cluster [ŋɡ] to [n] in weak syllables, principally in the verb ending -ing, which has occurred in many English dialects, although not in the modern standard varieties. Reduction of /mb/ and /mn/ to /m/, in later Middle English, affecting words like lamb and column.
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 ...
All languages differ in syllable structure and cluster template. A loanword from Adyghe in the extinct Ubykh language, psta ('to well up'), violates Ubykh's limit of two initial consonants. The English words sphere /ˈsfɪər/ and sphinx /ˈsfɪŋks/, Greek loanwords, break the rule that two fricatives may not appear adjacently word-initially ...
/zj/ → [ʒ] in words ending vowel+sure such as measure [ˈmɛʒəɹ] (also vowel+sion) In some other words, the coalesced pronunciation is common in English dialects around the world, but an older non-coalesced form still exists among some speakers of standard British English: educate [ˈɛdʒʊkeɪt] (also in standard RP: [ˈɛdjʊkeɪt])
An example is Dutch, where the rule is that initial and final syllables (word boundaries) take secondary stress, then every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress, as long as two stressed syllables are not adjacent and stress does not fall on /ə/ (there are, however, some exceptions to this rule).
When short, such vowels are said to have, or be in, weak position. [1] Poetry in Classical Latin also took advantage of short vowels in weak position. The following examples show the same word scanned in two different ways in a single line (the diacritics on the relevant vowels indicate the length of the entire syllable, as required by the ...
The first of these, with ten syllables, [b] has an uncontroversial masculine ending: the stressed syllable more. The last line, with eleven syllables, has an uncontroversial feminine ending: the stressless syllable me. The second and third lines end in two stressless syllables (-tri-us, on you). Having ten syllables, they are structurally ...