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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 ...
An acute on é ó indicates that the vowel is stressed and close-mid (/e o/), while grave on è ò indicates that the vowel is stressed and open-mid (/ɛ ɔ/). Grave on à and acute on í ú simply indicate that the vowels are stressed. Thus, the acute is used on close or close-mid vowels, and the grave on open or open-mid vowels.
Vowel reduction of second language speakers is a separate study. Stress-related vowel reduction is a principal factor in the development of Indo-European ablaut, as well as other changes reconstructed by historical linguistics. Vowel reduction is one of the sources of distinction between a spoken language and its written counterpart.
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 ...
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long ...
The terms checked vowel and free vowel correspond closely to the terms lax vowel and tense vowel, respectively, but linguists often prefer to use the terms checked and free, as there is no clear-cut phonetic definition of vowel tenseness, and, because by most given definitions of tenseness, / ɔː / and / ɑː / are considered lax—even though ...
In this example, the underline means that the /t/ or /d/ that becomes flapped must be in between two vowels (where the first is stressed and the second is not). The sound, or the features of the sound, that follows the one to be changed. In this example, the /t/ or /d/ that becomes flapped must be followed by an unstressed vowel.
In Old English, two forms of harmonic vowel breaking occurred: breaking and retraction and back mutation.. In prehistoric Old English, breaking and retraction changed stressed short and long front vowels i, e, æ to short and long diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea when followed by h or by r, l + another consonant (short vowels only), and sometimes w (only for certain short vowels): [3]