Re: USAGE: Stress in English

E fésto Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>:
> 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].
The question being, when people speak "slowly and carefully" enough to say
it that way, is it actually unpacking a fast speech pattern, or is it a
spelling pronunciation?

I think the best argument for the schwatic phoneme is native speakers that
can't distinguish what vowel a schwa is sposta be unstressed from, leading
to orthographic hesitation:  cf. the very common definately vs.
definitely, or miniscule vs. minuscule.   (Clearly in these cases the
spelling hasnt influenced their pronunciation) :p





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