For what it's worth, I definitely say [D@] (and not [DU] or [DV] or other
vowels like it) in my London accent, and it sounds more natural to me than
[Di:] (unless a vowel follows). I haven't noticed myself saying stressed
[@] for the indefinite article though, yet.
When I was first thinking about speech sounds a long time ago (as a naive
speaker trying to synthesize speech by chopping sounds out of words on a
computer and stringing them together), my intuition was that what I know
now to be schwa was just the vowel in 'put' - but once I read some
phonetics I realised that I definitely didn't say [fA:DU] for 'father'!
Michael Johnstone
On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Catherine Sangster wrote:
> Interesting question Ricardo. I have only some anecdotal evidence from
> British English, but I have heard (during research into something quite
> different, with teenaged speakers of Liverpool English) more than one
> instance of both definite and indefinite articles being produced with
> schwa in stressed position. I would concede that the prosodic profile of
> these sentences is a bit atypical. One example which demonstrates both,
> for what it's worth (they were talking about shopping for a wedding
> dress):
>
> "Oh, I didn't buy it. It wasn't THE [D@] dress, it was just A [@]
> dress."
>
> --
> Catherine Sangster
> BBC Pronunciation Research Unit
|