Unstressed vowels

Vowels in unstressed syllables

A common mistake is to transcribe full vowels for English unstressed syllables. If you transcribe banana as [bæ

nænæ], you are claiming that all three vowels are identical (except in loudness). Even in the slowest and most careful pronunciations, this isn't true. What symbol should be used instead?

The short, sort of accurate, answer is: all unstressed syllables in English have the "schwa" [ turned-e ]. The exceptions are that final unstressed syllables can sometimes have full vowels (e.g., potato) and [i] can often be unstressed even in the middle of words (e.g., radiate).

The longer, more accurate answer relies on the distinction between narrow and broad transcription.

Unstressed vowels in English are quite variable. The same speaker will pronounce the vowel [] in the second syllable of enough much the same way every time, but the schwa in the first syllable can be pronounced very differently on different occasions, sometimes even resembling full vowels like [], [], or []. [Note]

If we are interested in making narrow transcriptions, we could record the subtle variations for each utterance.
But if we are interested in a broad transcription, we will ignore them: we will only want to record those differences in sound which can affect the meaning of a word, and in English none of the variation in the first syllable will cause enough to mean something else. So for a broad transcription we use a single cover symbol for all the variations of the unstressed vowel, namely [].

Schwa and R

In broad transcriptions, many people transcribe the "er" sound of words like fur/fir as [

], even when this occurs in a stressed syllable. This choice has the initial advantage for many learners that all you have to do is turn the more familiar "er" upside down. It has the disadvantage that it's not an accurate reflection of what the mouth is doing. The consonant [

] is made by curling the tongue tip upward. In a word like fur, the tongue tip is already curled up by the end of the [f], usually earlier. There is simply no slice of time between the [f] and the [

] that we can call a vowel.

One common solution to this problem is to transcribe the "er" sound with the special IPA symbol [ schwa-hook ]. Unfortunately, there are no special symbols to solve the similar problem with [n], [l], and [m] -- for example, in normal speech there is simply no vowel between the [t] and the [n] of button, so transcribing the word as [b^t6n] is pretty inaccurate. We will return to this problem later in the course when we discuss "syllabicity".

A dialect glitch

Many speakers of English have intuitions that there are two different unstressed vowels and changing one for the other can change the meaning of the word.

graph with two overlapping clusters The classical minimal pair to illustrate this distinction, in dialects that make it, is roses versus Rosa's. You could record a speaker of such a dialect saying roses and Rosa's a hundred times each and plot on a graph the position of the speaker's tongue during the final vowel. There would be a large cloud of different positions for roses and a large cloud of positions for Rosa's -- there would be a large area where the two clouds overlapped, but it would still be clear the clouds had different centres.

graph with only one cluster If you did the same graph for a speaker of a dialect that doesn't make this distinction (like me), the two clouds would overlap so much that there would be no justification for saying that the two words had different vowels.

In transcribing roses and Rosa's, the difference between narrow and broad transcription is again relevant.

For a narrow transcription of a particular utterance, you would record the unstressed vowel as accurately as possible. If utterance 27 of roses was the same as utterance 83 of Rosa's, the two would be transcribed the same way.
For a broad transcription, you would pay more attention to the central positions of the two clouds, which suggest how the two words are generally pronounced.
- For dialects which do not contrast the words, where there is really only one cloud, the same symbol would be used for both words: [ozz].
- For dialects which do contrast the two words, where the clouds overlap but have different centres, you would use two different symbols; the usual choices are schwa and barred-i, []: Rosa's [ozz] and roses [ozz].

In my transcriptions, I will only use [ schwa ] for neutral unstressed vowels, i.e., for all unstressed vowels that are not full vowels, like the [i] in happy or [o] in potato. On assignments and tests, using schwa in broad transcriptions will always be acceptable. It's also a good habit to get into, as one way of unlearning habits that might carry over from English spelling.

Note: On some occasions, the two vowels of enough can be pronounced extremely similarly, especially when the word is being pronounced with unnatural slowness or carefulness or with more emphasis on the first syllable than it gets in normal speech. Writing [

] as [

] in a broad transcription is an easy trap to fall into if you are not careful to pronounce the word with normal speed and normal carefulness.

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