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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 ...
Unstressed syllables in English may contain almost any vowel, but in practice vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables tend to use different inventories of phonemes. In particular, long vowels are used less often in unstressed syllables than stressed syllables.
In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (see stress and vowel reduction in English).
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 ...
Each English word has an associated stress pattern: [1] each syllable is stressed or unstressed. Unstressed syllables are generally lower in pitch, quieter, shorter, and typically also phonetically reduced, notably with the vowels nearer to schwa. Many languages mark syllable stress and its absence with some of these features, but rely on them ...
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 ...
R-colored vowels are found in most rhotic forms of English, including General American and Irish English. The r-colored vowels of General American can be written with "vowel-r" diacritic : [ 12 ] [ɚ] : h ear se , ass er t , m ir th (stressed, conventionally written [ɝ] ); stand ar d , dinn er , Lincolnsh ire (unstressed)
Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables. Short vowels lengthen in stressed open syllables. On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from /iː i eː e a aː o oː u uː/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/, with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː ...