STRONG & WEAK FORMS

Vowel reduction affects the frequent monosyllabic grammar words of English, and many of them have two or more accepted pronunciations, one when stressed or spoken in isolation, the strong form, and one when reduced in their more usual unstressed position, the weak form. Learners’ dictionaries list both the strong and weak forms for such words, which have the following characteristics:

• They have only one syllable;
• They act as function words;
• They usually occur in their weak forms unless the speaker wishes to emphasize them to underline the message;
• The weak forms occur in speech only and are not (usually) shown in writing;
• They are high frequency words, though few in number (about fifty).

'Structural words, such as prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries and articles are often pronounced in their weak form, since they do not carry the main content, and are therefore not normally stressed.'