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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 clitics: they form a rhythmic pattern with an adjacent word, and cannot occur ...
Weak form and strong form may refer to: Weaker and stronger versions of a hypothesis, theorem or physical law; Weak formulations and strong formulations of differential equations in mathematics; Differing pronunciations of words depending on emphasis; see Weak and strong forms in English; Weak and strong pronouns
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, [1] dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. [2] In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed.
Many English function words have distinct strong and weak pronunciations; for example, the word a in the last example is pronounced /eɪ/, while the more common unstressed a is pronounced /ə/. See Weak and strong forms in English.
These can be strong (able to carry a full syllable) or weak (likely to collapse under the weight of a prefix or suffix). Verbs with a weak radical are termed weak verbs, and form partially regular exceptions to the normal conjugation rule. The consonants he, waw, and nun are among those likely to make a verb weak.
In that understanding, English has abundant examples of weak suppletion in its verbal inflection: e.g. bring/brought, take/took, see/saw, etc. Even though the forms are etymologically related in each pair, no productive morphological rule can derive one form from the other in synchrony.
This does not always apply, however, to the dropping of /h/ in weak forms of words like his and her. H-dropping in English is widely stigmatized, being perceived as a sign of poor or uneducated speech, and discouraged by schoolteachers. John Wells writes that it seems to be "the single most powerful pronunciation shibboleth in England." [10]
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 ...