Re: USAGE: Stress in English

 --- "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote: > 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].
Your example of course (because like anything does...)
doesn't hold for all dialects: I say [p@mIt] vs
[p8:m@t]. However, I think the schwa is simply a
phoneme that says 'there's a vowel here' but avoids
saying which vowel it is. [Vu\lON] would be just as
usable for 'along' as [ej.long] if we spelt it with an
o instead.

--
Tristan.

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