stressed schwa in (American) English

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stressed schwa in (American) English

Postby jururu » 2003-09-19, 4:30

I need some information on stressed schwa in American English.
(regional distribution and so on)


I have heard many Americans and Canadians using
schwa (Image)
instead of closed a (Image):


love,
just,
sun,
enough
and so on...


A dictionary I have says (Image is more common in American English while (Image) is more common in Southern UK English...

I am not talking about the stressed schwa in words like hurry, courage, but in the words like crush, just, love, son, color and so on...


I have been looking for information everyplace but I have only found a information that MANY AMERICANS (ESPECIALLY THOSE ON EAST COAST) USE schwa instead of Image)

here is the sound sample (copy and paste into your player):

http://www.geocities.com/tom_sugnet/stressed_schwa.wma

color inside, the color of your mind, the color inside
but it ain't over till its gone, there's a change inside of me, and I just
I recovered on my own
in a song that was written just for me
I feel your touch and kiss is not enough
strong enough
love just ain't enough



Many thanks!

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Postby Patricia » 2003-09-19, 11:11

If my memory serves me well, and those tortuous English Phonology courses have been good at least for something, schwa only occurs in unstressed syllables, being that one of its main (or it's only) characteristics.

But of course I could be wrong....

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Postby E}{pugnator » 2003-09-19, 13:26

I don't think so, Pat...In Romanian, this phoneme known as schwa can also be stressed (unless it's actually another phoneme).
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Postby E}{pugnator » 2003-09-19, 13:57

TOMINHO, você quer seu login TOMINHO de volta? ele simplesmente não tava marcado como "ACTIVE", isso já aconteceu algumas vezes...se quiser, eu ativo ela e deleto "jururu", se não quiser, vou deletá-la...
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Postby Psi-Lord » 2003-09-19, 14:19

Well, it's true that, on my English classes, I've also been taught that schwa never occurs in stressed syllables (Merriam-Webster even defines 'schwa' as 'an unstressed mid-central vowel', and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's dictionary defines it as 'the weak vowel sound in some syllables that are not emphasized'); however, I've already heard things about stressed schwas in other languages (such as in some dialects of Catalan), so I don't really know what to think about it. Hey, Pittsboy, where are you now?
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Postby Guest » 2003-09-19, 18:38

there is a stressed schwa in some variaties of Paulista-portuguese where

a in ama, dano, cana sounds like a schwa

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Postby Patricia » 2003-09-19, 18:41

I was referring only to English. I don't know about the occurrence of schwa in other languages.

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On & Off topic: 'schwa'

Postby Psi-Lord » 2003-09-19, 19:28

On topic:

Even though I mentioned other languages having a stressed schwa, I guess I interrupted my line of thought — with that I mean that, even though I've learnt that English hasn't got stressed schwas, it seems to be possible in other languages, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn certain 'dialects' of English do use them, too. Yet, I'm pretty far from having the knowledge to judge it (hence my calling for Pittsboy, hehe).


Off topic:

After all these years talking about 'schwa', I've found out that, in Portuguese, besides 'schwa', there are two Portuguese-rendered possible forms: 'chevá' and (my favourite) 'xuá'. :) Now that is cute! ;)
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Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-19, 23:11

Psi-Lord wrote:Well, it's true that, on my English classes, I've also been taught that schwa never occurs in stressed syllables (Merriam-Webster even defines 'schwa' as 'an unstressed mid-central vowel', and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's dictionary defines it as 'the weak vowel sound in some syllables that are not emphasized'); however, I've already heard things about stressed schwas in other languages (such as in some dialects of Catalan), so I don't really know what to think about it. Hey, Pittsboy, where are you now?


Psi, according to the cardinal vowels thingie, you are absolutely right, schwas are ALWAYS lax (unstressed), for, if you take a look, schwa is the most central vowel sound made when you have a setting where your vocal tract is the most lax. In English what is believed (as in other languages) is that stressed sounds such as /3/ and /^/ tend to be reduced to /@/ when they are unstressed or that unstressed /@/ becomes stressed /^/ or /3/. So, actually we would need some sort of more specific criterion for representing /@/ in the world languages. I believe English has a sort of complementary distribution of /@/, /^/ and /3/. It means that even though words DO have a morphophonemic /@/, this phoneme becomes a /3/ or a /^/ when it is stressed and vice-versa. So the three sounds would represent the same pheneme but in different contexts. Also it depends ont eh word positionh inside the sentence, for, as we know, the conjunction "and" may be pronounced as both [@nd] and [ænd], however the former occurs in unstressed environments and the latter in stressed environments! We need to be careful when dealing with phoneme inventaries for phonemes will be slightly different from those represented in the IPA cardinal vowels chart.

example>

//'m@ther// (morphophonemic level)
Stress rule applying
['m^ther] (phonetic level)
Last edited by Pittsboy on 2003-09-19, 23:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Guest » 2003-09-19, 23:16

American English, at least as it's spoken in the Mid-West, has
stressed schwa, as for example in words like "hut" and "cut," or the
stressed vowel in "mother," "butter." (See for example Ladefoged 1975,
A Course in Phonetics, pp. 28-30.)

David Ludden
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* David Ludden
*
* Dept. of Psychology
* University of Iowa
* Iowa City, IA 52242


taken from http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:WD ... n&ie=UTF-8

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Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-19, 23:24

Anonymous wrote:there is a stressed schwa in some variaties of Paulista-portuguese where

a in ama, dano, cana sounds like a schwa


Well, nobody is sure about anything related to Brazilian Portuguese vowels. I have personally never heard such a thing as a /@/ sound in words such as "cama", "dano"... this sound is rather a /3/ than anything else or even a /ã/ but not a schwa!!
This is some discussion that phonologists do not agree among themselves... lots of words have been published about BP vowels but almost none have used any sort of acoustic analysis in order to say concrete things about the subject... also, if you guys take a look at Thais Cristofaro's manual of phonemics (which is rather incorrect in many points though) you will note she uses /@/ for the Brazilian Portuguese word-final unstressed /a/ as in "cama" which is totally incorrect, since this occurs in Portuguese but not in Brazilian Portuguese, which is rather a "turned a" than anything else.... just some thoughts...
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Postby Guest » 2003-09-20, 0:09

I would say that many Brazilians use schwa when pronouncing final -a:





dona, ama, Ana


I have a Paulistano friend who does the same.


Many people do this closing (even in VOZ DO BRASIL @ radiobrás).


Thaïs also offered a plain a in this situation as an alternative.



8) Thaïs' book is great.
I love the part in which she stated NH and LH were not pronounced
like in Portugal (in most speakers)



btw

langenscheidt portuguese dictionary (by Melhoramentos SP) also
uses schwa for final unstressed a in Brazilian Portuguese.
Furthermore, they used schwa for nasalized a (like in cama, ama)
which is totally Paulistano.

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Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-20, 0:23

Anonymous wrote:I would say that many Brazilians use schwa when pronouncing final -a:

dona, ama, Ana

I have a Paulistano friend who does the same.
Many people do this closing (even in VOZ DO BRASIL @ radiobrás).
Thaïs also offered a plain a in this situation as an alternative.

8) Thaïs' book is great.
I love the part in which she stated NH and LH were not pronounced
like in Portugal (in most speakers)
btw

langenscheidt portuguese dictionary (by Melhoramentos SP) also
uses schwa for final unstressed a in Brazilian Portuguese.
Furthermore, they used schwa for nasalized a (like in cama, ama) which is totally Paulistano.


Well, as I told you before: prove to me that word-final unstressed /a/ is /@/ and I will give you lots of ice cream... people who usually describe word-final unstressed /a/ as /@/ DO NOT describe it according to acoustic experiments SO, articulatorily, it is not aprehensible the fact that Brazilian Portuguese word-final unstressed /a/ is rather a /turned a/... schwas in that position occur in Portugal as I am concerned.
I major in Linguistics and I surely know a lot of the literature on the subject and also ALL my professors at USP (Universidade de São Paulo) agree with me that in Brazilian Portuguese, the word-final unstressed /a/ is /turned a/ and NOT a schwa... I have personally never met anyone from Paulistano speech (which happens to be the the same I speak) to do such a thing you said...
I won't use an English-Portuguese dictionary for it uses a rather approximation of a word-final unstressed /a/ for speakers of English, which is indeed a /@/, but this is not what happens in Brazilian Portuguese.

What concerns to NH, even some traditional grammars describe the very same Thais does, SO, not a big deal on that!

BTW, I am taking this graduate course in Laboratory Phonology by Professor Didier Demolin (from the Université Libre de Bruxelles) and as I have to write a paper with the results of a linguistic investigation of some aspect in a language, I will pick this one and use acoustic proofs in order to prove that word-final unstressed /a/ is /turned a/ and not /@/...
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Postby Luís » 2003-09-20, 9:52

Pittsboy wrote:she uses /@/ for the Brazilian Portuguese word-final unstressed /a/ as in "cama" which is totally incorrect, since this occurs in Portuguese but not in Brazilian Portuguese, which is rather a "turned a" than anything else....


Pittsboy wrote:schwas in that position occur in Portugal as I am concerned.


No, they do not. Those are turned a's. In EP, cama would be transcribed as ['kɐmɐ] - The same for the other examples.

a is always either [a] or [ɐ].
Only e (and also i) can be reduced to schwa and schwa only occurs in unstressed positions.

de [də] da [dɐ] are, for instance, 2 words only distinguished by the difference ɐ / ə

And from what I heard of BP, those final a's don't sound schwa at all to me.
Last edited by Luís on 2003-09-20, 15:55, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby E}{pugnator » 2003-09-20, 14:00

I am a "baiano" speaker, and I can say my final a's don't sound shcwa, "chevá" or "xuá" (que coisa gay! onde eh q c arrumou isso, Marcel? C vem com cada palavra estranha, mas essa c se superou!!!). I think it's merely the inverted a...

As for cama, ano...I'm almost sure the 'a' i pronounce before the nasal consoants is nasal, even if it's not the pure nasal a...But in Belo Horizonte i heard people pronouncing it more close than the inverted a sound, and not nasal...as the first a in "camisa"...Would this be a schwa?

As for LH, i don't think I pronounce it much different from Portugal...I still make a lateral consonant sound, perhaps it's not the lambda phoneme, but I do not always do like mineiros who make it simply a semivowel and "eat" the rest of the words...I do say "trabalho", "coalhada" and I can say "filho" and velho" when I want so...I think I also make this same sound in unestressed "lia" endings: família, Natália...

The NH...well, my opinion is that that I nasalize the previous vowel and make a semivowel "i" sound, so, it's actually a nasal diphtong (nothing new)...And I think the "real" nh sound is made in "ni" syllables.

Well, that's my two R$ cents
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Postby Psi-Lord » 2003-09-20, 15:51

I could never find out what my first a in words like 'cama' is — a nasal or an inverted a; neither is a schwa though, I'm sure of that.

My lh is probably, most often than not, closer to [lj] than to [L], unless I'm paying attention to it. As for the nh, that's a discussion we had with my former Linguistics teacher to which I never got to any conclusions. ;)

Luís, edit your post — you were actually quoting Pittsboy, not me. ;)

E}{pugnator, believe it or not, I found those totally by accident while digging some words in Aurélio, hehehehe... ;) I was like totally surprised to find out it had made its way into Portuguese. :D Now I need a Houaiss to check and see whether they're still present almost 15 years after Aurélio published them. ('xuá' reminds me of 'axé', hehe)
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Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-20, 17:01

The question of central vowel phonemes in English has a long history in linguistic literature. The Trager-Smith phoneme system from the early 50's recognized and provided useful symbols for a host of possible central vowels.

The problem is that the central vowel space in the mouth is not chopped up with anything close to the precision of the English front and back vowels: in general, front vowels, for instance, distinguish:

*tense vowels /i, e/ from lax vowels /I, E/; and
*high vowels /i, I/ from mid vowels /e, E/ from low vowel /ae/;

That's 5 front vowels; and there are four or five (depending on where you live and speak) back vowels. That's in general, of course; your mileage will vary in some contexts, like vowels that occur before /r/.
But there are usually just two central vowels: /a/ and /@/. And /a/ is often classed as a back vowel, to parallel /ae/ and make front and back symmetric. So where's all this variation coming from?

Everywhere. English has this habit of reducing almost every unstressed vowel to somewhere in the shwa region. Sometimes this sounds a little like the vowel that's supposed to be there (most likely with /i/ and /u/), and sometimes -- especially when we're speaking rapidly, (i.e, naturally) -- it doesn't, as is almost always the case with /a/ and with the lax vowels, which mostly come out as normal shwa /@/.

All this is unstressed, OK? Now, what about stressed? That gets more complicated. When stressed, all English vowels are lengthened, and vowel length is also used to signal other things in the language, like the voicing value of a following consonant (which is how we really distinguish ad from at), or whether there's supposed to be a consonant there (the way fur is pronounced in RP, for instance).

And in rhotic American dialects there's a retroflexed mid-central phoneme that's a semivowel, like /w/ is the semivowel of /u/, and /y/ is the semivowel of /i/. This retroflexed (tongue turned backwards) mid-central semivowel is often written as a shwa with an r-like hook to its top right; let me represent this symbol here as <@r>. Then there are two central vowel phonemes in Rhotic American English (at least -- I'm describing my own dialect here, and your mileage may vary): /@/ and /<@r>/

And they are distributed very widely in this vast, airy central vowel space because they don't contrast with one another in space -- they contrast in whether the tongue is curled. In the front or back of the mouth, you have to be very precise in pronouncing stressed vowels, but in the middle, you can roam through enormous phonological space for which the IPA has at least a dozen symbols and you'll still be understood, because there's nothing to contrast with.

Systematically, that is. Individually, personal contrasts abound, for individual reasons. It's all part of the massive and inclusive art.

Historically, this is one way that sound changes happen. If any good contrasts catch on, the space begins to be fragmented, and after some threshhold is crossed, we begin to revise the system to take it into account. But this takes a long time. Unconscious generations of it.
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Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-20, 17:08

Psi-Lord wrote:As for the nh, that's a discussion we had with my former Linguistics teacher to which I never got to any conclusions. ;)
E}{pugnator, believe it or not, I found those totally by accident while digging some words in Aurélio, hehehehe... ;) I was like totally surprised to find out it had made its way into Portuguese. :D Now I need a Houaiss to check and see whether they're still present almost 15 years after Aurélio published them. ('xuá' reminds me of 'axé', hehe)


Psi - you will get the same acoustic perception of an NH if you pronounce it as [N] (as in siNG) + a vowel... try saying [kami'No] for instance!

Some professors of mine also pronounce "schwa" like "chvá", I believe this comes from the Hebrew word for the same thing...
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Postby Guest » 2003-09-20, 20:39

schwa symbol can be used for reversed-a sound...

Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd edition, Chicago University Press
page 48

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Postby Guest » 2003-09-20, 20:53

as for brazilian NH being pronounced differently than spanish Ñ or italian/french GN or lusitanian NH (copyright: Thaïs C. Silva, Fonética e fonologia de português)

Image




as for schwa:

Gleason does not distinguish Imagefrom Imageand describes Image as mid central or back. (Phonetic Symbol Guide)


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