Talk:Stress and vowel reduction in English

message: I'd be grateful if someone with more experience of editing than I have could advise me. I am hoping to make some improvements to this article 'Vowel Reduction in English', but don't feel able to start on that until the relationship to the material in the article 'Vowel Reduction' is cleared up. The Vowel Reduction article quite correctly begins by pointing out that the term is ambiguous: it may refer to the phonetic process of reduction, observable under laboratory conditions as in the important work by Lindblom in the 1960's, or it may refer to the way in which one phonological vowel unit may take the place of another (for example, how the first syllable of 'photography' and the second syllable of 'photographic' come to have a schwa vowel). Hence the phonological aspect of vowel reduction is essentially about objects (reduced and unreduced vowels) and their incidence. The phonological study of vowel reduction could be historical (i.e. study of sound change), or it could be the type of theorizing found in Generative Phonology, where a surface reduced vowel is derived by rules from an underlying unreduced vowel (e.g. the vowels in 'photograph', 'photography' etc). So far, so good. However, when we come to the Vowel Reduction in English article, there is virtually nothing here that is actually about the process of reduction. What we do find is material on various reduced vowels of English, together with some information on the contexts in which they occur. If the title of this article were to be 'Reduced Vowels in English' it would be fine. Would it be possible to change this? I'm nervous of doing it myself.   Peter Roach  RoachPeter (talk) 10:51, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure. Go ahead and move it. Or I will, if you like. — kwami (talk) 10:59, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, the move seems fine to me.  — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:52, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the response. What i am proposing is changing the name of Vowel Reduction in English, and making the corresponding change in the reference to it in Vowel Reduction. My worry is whether this would break links from other articles. I haven't suggested moving anything. Would be glad if you would do the name change for me, if you are happy with that.   Peter Roach. RoachPeter (talk) 20:47, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, because of the magic of Wikipedia, links to the old title are redirected to the new one so links aren't broken like that.  At some point after a rename, robots (or magical fairies) go through and change the links to avoid redirects but that's just designed to reduce server demand. — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 21:58, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

text: Anyone object to doing this then? I've been tidying the secondary stress article, and have moved or copied the other specific-language information to the respective articles, but it's still dominated by a lot of detail about English, which ought to be moved out to an English-specific article, and because of the amount of detail I don't think it fits well (except as a summary) in English phonology; and so because of the close interconnection with the subject matter of this article, I find the most natural course of action to be to combine the two topics (stress in English, reduced vowels in English) into a single article. Agreed? Or not? Victor Yus (talk) 08:27, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a useful move to me. I'm worried in general by the way English tends to dominate articles on prosodic phenomena that don't have 'English' in the title. But I'm a bit uncertain about what's intended here - could you clarify? In the penult. sentence above, you say you want to combine 'stress in English' with 'reduced vowels in English'. Did you mean 'secondary stress in English' here? 'Secondary stress in English' is a tiny topic, but 'Stress in English' is big. RoachPeter (talk) 10:18, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, what I envisage is one comprehensive article covering the (interconnected) topics of stress and vowel reduction in English. Of course if that article itself got too big, then it could be split somehow, but based on the amount of information we currently have on these subjects on Wikipedia, I don't think it would be an excessive amount of material for a single page. Victor Yus (talk) 11:34, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I like that approach.  Would we need to title it "Stress and vowel reduction" in English or would "Stress in English" suffice?  Neither title format is present for any other language.  — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:41, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The thing is that in English there are distinctions made that, according to some approaches, are differences in level of stress, while other approaches interpret them merely as differences in level of vowel reduction. Calling the article just "Stress..." might imply a bias towards the view that vowel reduction is a stress difference. Victor Yus (talk) 14:41, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that's right. When you look at all the places in Wikipedia where English stress is mentioned, it's clear that there are very different views about what English stress actually is, and it will be important to see that all properly argued views are represented. RoachPeter (talk) 16:01, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title of this article 

message: I'd like to suggest tidying up by merging material on [ɪ] and [ɨ] with more recently added material about the happY vowel [i], and adding material on the corresponding [u] vowel (inflUence) to the part on reduced back rounded vowels. There would then be just one piece on reduced front unrounded vowels and one on reduced back rounded vowels. I will do this if nobody objects.  RoachPeter (talk) 09:19, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems fine. — kwami (talk) 18:09, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I've had a go at the editing I proposed, and hope it reads better. I have yet to add the works referred to into the Bibliography, but will do so shortly. RoachPeter (talk) 19:11, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good. Can you explain one thing to me: you write that happY is being analyzed as a neutralization of KIT and FLEECE in final position, which makes sense; but how do these accounts address the vowel in, say, hurrIEd (which I believe is distinct from the possible KIT in horrId)? Is this no longer considered to be the happY vowel, or are we relying on the morpheme boundary to explain the tensing? Victor Yus (talk) 10:06, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, this is quite a complicated matter, and I hesitated about going into it at length in the article. The present situation arises from two sources: (1) the observation that many younger speakers were using a longer, closer [i]-like vowel for final unstressed vowels previously transcribed with the KIT vowel, which led to the term happY-tensing (we could call that a sociolinguistic issue), and (2) the need of dictionaries to represent both possible pronunciations without needing to print the word twice (which is essentially about economy of space, a matter of great importance to dictionary publishers). HappY-tensing could be represented without inventing new symbols, simply by saying that speakers may use either the KIT vowel or the FLEECE vowel, but that increases the number of pronunciations to print in a dictionary. The first person to use the convention of using the [i] symbol as a KIT/FLEECE archiphoneme was Gordon Walsh, of Longman publishers, for the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English in the 1980’s, but he never gets any credit for it because he wasn’t an academic. Once the idea of a single symbol that’s neutral between KIT and FLEECE caught on, its use spread to many dictionaries and textbooks. John Wells has pushed it further than others for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, so that in the 3rd edition (2008) it’s used not only for ‘hurry’ but also for ‘hurried’, on the gounds that the vowel doesn’t change when the suffix is added and a speaker is free to pronounce with KIT or FLEECE. The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary does the same. Both dictionaries give only the KIT vowel for the last syllable in 'horrid', which is of course a single morpheme. However, the Cambridge dictionary doesn’t agree with Wells when he uses this vowel preconsonantally in unstressed prefixes such as be-, de-, pre-, re- and de-. Cambridge continues to use the KIT vowel for these. Do you think I should try to put in something brief to explain the convention more fully?  RoachPeter (talk) 10:54, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, that might be useful, though my question was more about the phonological interpretation than about the dictionary convention. If hurrIEd has [i] and horrId has KIT, and these are distinct, then how can [i] be analyzed as being an archiphoneme that includes KIT? Victor Yus (talk) 11:29, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, the honest answer has to be that the theoretical justification for [i] has not been argued in detail, to my knowledge. I think it can be said that the archiphoneme [i] (or |i|) does not include the KIT vowel, it takes its place in certain contexts. The idea of the archiphoneme has a respectable history in phonology (perhaps the most exhaustive analysis is Tsutomu Akamatsu’s ‘The Theory of Neutralization and the Archiphoneme in Functional Phonology’ (1988, 550pp)); the Wikipedia treatment of it in Neutralization and archiphonemes is clear and thorough. In the case of [i], Wells says ‘… the opposition between FLEECE and KIT is in effect suspended in weak syllables …’ (1982, p.166). I think we have to say that [i] only occurs in unstressed syllables, either before a vowel or at the end of a morpheme. Minimal pairs are hard to come by, but if we compare ‘gelid’ and ‘jellied’ (far-fetched, I agree), then the former must have the KIT vowel and the latter the happY [i]. We could not have [i] in ‘gelid’ because the vowel is neither prevocalic nor morpheme-final. RoachPeter (talk) 14:48, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I see the minimal pair taxis/taxes in comments above.  Or is that something else? — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 16:12, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Good one - I had forgotten that example. It works the same: the reduced vowel in 'taxis' is morpheme-final, so gets the happY vowel, while the equivalent vowel in 'taxes' is morpheme-initial, not final, and gets KIT. RoachPeter (talk) 16:39, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Candid vs. candied might be another one. So given these pairs, it seems there's quite a reasonable case to identify [i] positively with FLEECE rather than KIT. But then we have this manatee vs. humanity thing, also mentioned here, which complicates things further... Victor Yus (talk) 18:35, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  [i] and [u] and related vowels 

message: What should be done about this article Weak form and strong form? Like the previous version of secondary stress (and even more so in fact), it seems to relate entirely to English. Looking at Google Books and Scholar, it seems clear that this (the linguistic) use is not the primary use of these terms anyway. I propose merging it into this article, since that topic is intimately connected with the present one (two). Victor Yus (talk) 07:03, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I think merging as you suggest would be a good idea - and filling it out with a bit more information. RoachPeter (talk) 14:50, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I have now done this. If you have more information you'd like to add, please go ahead. Victor Yus (talk) 13:01, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good. Just one concern - the case of 'our' as a weak form. You rightly separate it from the main weak form words, but I think readers could still get the impression that it's one of a special group of words. Unless you have a citation, I feel that any weak or reduced pronunciation of 'our' is really just a fast speech phenomenon. Unstressed 'hour' would reduce in the same way, wouldn't it? (e.g. In 'Half an hour over the limit') RoachPeter (talk) 18:04, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess so, though I seem to remember reading somewhere that the smoothing of unstressed our is more consistent than that of other words, and even extends to dialects that don't generally exhibit much smoothing (probably somewhere in Wells, though I don't have any reference to hand). Victor Yus (talk) 11:41, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You might want to check out Lisa Lavoie's 2002 JIPA article "Some influences on the realization of for and four in American English."  — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:44, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Weak form and strong form]]

message: Before the recent improvements, the last para of this section was marked as possibly biased to a paticular point of view. This was because I wanted to remove the para, principally on the grounds that it is about consonants, not vowels. It also makes an argument that is based on one single, non-standard view of syllable division. When I tried to remove the para, Kwamikagami insisted on putting it back in.  I would at least like to put the warning flag back on it. RoachPeter (talk) 14:58, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: How is it biased when we're explicit that it's the POV of certain people? — kwami (talk) 20:39, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Are we?  All I see is "some linguists."  What's the contrasting view? — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 23:49, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: And then we say Wells. — kwami (talk) 06:32, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, we give the views but don't position them within a larger context of what other linguists think about the same phenomena.  If it's a POV issue, we might want to do that. — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:48, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

text: I should make it clear that the "biased" flag was not put in by me, and my argument was not principally about bias. It was that this para is not about vowels (reduced or unreduced) but about allophonic variation in consonants, and consequently not directly relevant to the article. RoachPeter (talk) 09:05, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't claim to have knowledge about whether the descriptive claims in the paragraph are accurate, or are contadicted by other sources, but I don't think it's appropriate to add a POV flag when we already note that the views are those of certain people. (Of course if contradictory views exist, then they can be added.) I also don't think this can be considered irrelevant to the topic, as it addresses the important subject (which is not currently well explained) of what the real differences might be between the vowels we elect to call "reduced" and those we call "full". The different effects that the two sets of vowels (are claimed to) have on syllable division, and/or/hence on consonant allophony, would provide evidence of a real distinction between them, and hence is highly pertinent. Victor Yus (talk) 09:22, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It does seem better contextualized than it was before.  I haven't seen any suggestions for where it might be moved to.  — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 12:48, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Distinctions between reduced and unreduced vowels 

message: Please see the discussion of "schwu" in topic 4 above. "Schwi" is fine as a joke term for informal use, but I am not aware of any use of it in serious publications on English pronunciation. If there is one, please cite it. The risk is that if these terms are used seriously, people will come to regard the name "schwa" as having something to do with the 'palm' vowel and this would be wrong. The fact that there is a redirect doesn't make it OK to continue to use this term, unless with a warning about its use. RoachPeter (talk) 13:22, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You're free to add a warning that this is not an "official" technical term in linguistics, but more like a jocular informal term like haplogy or, closer to home, NZ English DRESS rising. I wouldn't know either way; I'm not an Anglist. But as long as there is a redirect, the reader who is brought here through this redirect has a right to be informed what the hell a schwi is. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:15, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: DRESS raising, as funny as it sounds, is perfectly formal. See Lexical set#Wells Standard Lexical Sets for English and Relative articulation#Raised and lowered. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 19:40, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please not "schwi" again 

message: I came to this article looking for the "normal" stress rules in English. Yes, stress is phonemic in English, but when an English speaker encounters a word he has never seen before, at least in writing, which admittedly is secondary in language, he usually knows how to stress it. I just tested this by looking up a random word in the Oxford American Dictionary. I found the words febrifuge and its derivative febrifugal. I had no problem figuring out the stress, and the phonetic transcription confirmed this, so there must be some rules that apply in at least many cases. Bostoner (talk) 17:47, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: There are patterns, but no 'rules'.  The more words you know, the more likely you will be able to predict the stress of a novel word, but you'll never be 100%.  — kwami (talk) 02:39, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a '"normal" stress rule' in English...  it's called the 'Normal Stress Rule', imaginatively enough.  But it's something of a Holy Roman Empire case, being more of an occasional guideline for  vowel reduction than advertised.  Quick summary:  antepenultimate syllable, with a whole hatful of other 'rules' that contradict it (such as verb/noun distinctions), and some ad hoc exceptions on top, as per.  Not clear why there's not an article on Wikipedia on it.  The topic is touched on initial-stress-derived noun, and there's an article on the paper The Sound Pattern of English which itself goes into Chomskyesque detail and precise on the topic.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 01:09, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Normal Stress Rules in English 

message: How does one indicate that the sound of u in "gerund" is not the same as in "up"? I can understand that some kinds of English don't have a schwa here, but the transcription /ˈdʒɛrʌnd/ would mislead most nonnative speakers to pronounce this word and many others incorrectly. Wells is claimed as a source for this misleading transcription; what exactly does he say about the pronunciation of unstressed vowels in general and in this case?--Espoo (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  phonetic indication of reduction of unstressed vowels