Independent work Reduction: strong and weak forms

Independent work

Reduction: strong and weak forms

What is the reduction?

Reduction is a process of weakening, shortening, or disappearance of vowel sounds in the unstressed position. Reduction is closely related to such notions as ‘’word stress’’ and ‘’sentence stress’’. English speech moves in regular rhythmic beats from stress to stress.

To maintain the rhythm of speech , words that carry information are marked by the stress, whereas words that show grammatical relationships are not marked by the stress.

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So, in English there exists an evident contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables:

• words that carry the main information are generally stressed and have mostly strong forms, they are called ‘’notional words’’, and they comprise the following part of speech:

Nouns, adjectives, notional verbs, adverbs, numerals, interrogative pronouns, demonstrative pronouns.

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2.Words that link the content words and thus help to form utterance are called “form words” or “ structural words” and they include such part of speech as : articles, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, reflexive pronouns, relative pronouns and the indefinite pronoun “some”.

Above mentioned Word forms have two forms of pronunciation: strong and weak( full and reduced) form. These words have strong forms when they are stressed. Each of these words usually has more than one weak form used in unstressed positions.

There are three degree of the reduction of strong forms.

The first degree consists in reducing the length of a vowel without changing its quality( so-called Quantitative reduction)

• For[fo:], you[ju:],
• he[hi:], your[jo:]

Strong forms

• For[fo], you[ju]
• He[hi], your[jo]

Weak forms with quantitative reduction

• 2.The second degree of reduction consist in changing the quality of a vowel( the so-called qualitative reduction)
• Note: most vowels in weak forms are reduced to the neutral (schwa), although the long vowels [i:] and [u:] are usually reduced to [i] and [u] respectively.
• 3. The third degree of reduction consists in the omission of a vowel or consonant sound (the so-called zero reduction).

Here some words that can strong and weak form.

In short, reduction is the process where sounds are not clearly articulated or even disappear in certain content.

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