Stress and Vowel Reduction in English - Reduced Vowels

Reduced Vowels

Certain vowel sounds in English are associated strongly with absence of stress: they occur practically exclusively in unstressed syllables; and conversely, most (though not all) unstressed syllables contain one of these sounds. These are known as reduced vowels, and tend to be characterized by such features as shortness, laxness and central position. The exact set of reduced vowels depends on dialect and speaker; the principal ones are described in the sections below.

Read more about this topic:  Stress And Vowel Reduction In English

Famous quotes containing the words reduced and/or vowels:

    Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    Playing “bop” is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
    Duke Ellington (1899–1974)