2. Before final /t/
at the end of a statement or sentence:
I can’t. Give me that. It costs a lot. Stop it.
before a pause:
If you find it, call me.
within or at the end of a word when the next syllable or word begins with a consonant sound:
Football, pointless, right now. Late at night. You're quite right. Let me know.
9. Reduction in connected speech.
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress,sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as “weakening”. It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
Reduction is a historical process of weakening, shortening or disappearance of vowel sounds in unstressed positions. Reduction reflects the process of lexical and grammatical changes. Reduction is closely connected with word stress, sentence stress and rhythm.
There are two "tiers" of vowels in English:
reduced or weak
full or strong
In English, vowel reduction is thecentralizationand weakening of anunstressed vowel, such as the characteristic change of many vowels at the ends of words toschwa. Stressed vowels are never reduced in English.
English has up to five reduced vowels, though this varies with dialect and speaker. Schwais the most common, and orthographically it may be denoted by any of the vowel letters:
The a in about.
The e in synthesis.
The o in harmony.
The u in medium.
Reduction is realized:
in unstressed syllables within words (demonstrative [
])in unstressed form-words, auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns within intonation groups and phrases.
Three different types of reduction are noticed in English:
1. Quantitative reduction – shortening of a vowel sound in the unstressed position, affects mainly long vowels (he [hi: - hiJ - hi]).
2. Qualitative reduction – obscuration of vowels towards [ə, , ], affects both long and short vowels (can [cæn] – [cən]).
3. Elision of vowels in the unstressed position.
10. Elision.
Elision – is a very common process in informal speech. It means missing out of consonant or vowel that would be present in the slow colloquial pronunciation of a word in isolation. Thus elision is a feature of rapid colloquial speech.
When 2 or more consonants often of a similar nature, come together, there is tendency in English to simplify such a cluster by eliding one of them. The longer the cluster, the more of a chance there is of elision.
Cluster reduction can occur in between as well as inside words and mainly involves the deletion of voiceless oral plosives when it would otherwise be more difficult to produce 2 plosives in a row as this would require 2 closure phases. If a reduction occurs inside a word, it may also lead to a reduction in a number of syllables. (Ex.: asked, desktop, hard disk, straight towards, wait to)
One of the most typical examples of elision is the omission of /t/ and /d/ between 2 other consonants. (Ex.: friends - /frenz/, mostly - /məusli/)
Another example is the dropping of /h/ in pronouns and auxiliaries. Pronouns with the initial /h/ and the auxiliaries have, has, had commonly loss /h/ when they are unstressed within an utterance. /h/ is pronounced in these words when they are initial in an utterance or when they are stressed. (Ex.: The people have gone. She gave him his breakfast. It took him half an hour. But: He is going away.)
Loss of final /v/ in “of” before consonants. (Ex.: lots of them, waste of money)