Re: USAGE: Stress in English
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 23:12 |
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On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 05:21:22PM -0500, Trebor Jung wrote:
> in H. S. Teoh's example, there
> is a difference in vowel _and_ stress, thus eliminating this word pair for
> minimal pair status.
I had a feeling someone would cite one of those other examples, and
someone else would point out the vowel thing. That gets into the tricky
question of whether or not the schwa is a phoneme in English. You can
make the case that it is merely an artifact of phonology, and that the
underlying phonemic vowel in unstressed syllables has its full quality.
There is evidence for this in the fact that when speaking v-e-r-y
s-l-o-w-l-y, people tend to pronounce, e.g., "along" as [ej.long].
-Mark
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