Today we’re circling back to the /ɪ/ sound from last week, but the main focus will be on my favourite sound, which as you’ll know if you’ve listened to season 1 is the schwa /ə/ sound. Previously, we’ve mainly looked at these sounds in individual words. Today’s focus is slightly different: we’re looking at sentence level speech and the way in which these sounds appear in the weak forms of grammar words.
So as not to overload you with new information, we’re going to do this by reviewing some of the rhymes and tongue twisters we’ve looked at so far, whether in the podcast, or in the season 1 video bonuses, or via my Instagram. If you’ve been practising these and matching my pronunciation, you’ll have been pronouncing these weak forms already, but perhaps it’s not something you’ve actively focused on before.
Learning to recognise the weak forms of grammar words is a feature of pronunciation which is really important when listening (by learning to focus on the keywords and filter out the grammar words, you’re more likely to grasp the main meaning of what you hear), but also can be a great one to work on to ensure that you yourself stress the right keywords, help your listener filter out the grammar words, and therefore help them grasp the importance of what you’re saying. The time spent today noticing these sounds will be an important step if you wish these weak forms to spread out into your more spontaneous speech.
So, I’ve already talked about grammar words, and in order to describe what these are it’s most useful to contrast them with what we call content words. These are the words, most often nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, which carry the key meaning in a sentence. For example, in the tongue twister:
A proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot.
The content words are proper, cup, coffee, copper, coffee and pot – in other words the nouns and adjectives. The grammar words are the article ‘a’ and the prepositions ‘of’ and ‘in’. These are necessary to hold the sentence together grammatically, but aren’t as important.
Listen to the pronunciation of “a”, “of” and “in”. You’ll notice that ‘a’ and ‘of’ both take the schwa sound: ‘a’ becomes /ə/ and, of /əv/. Reducing these sounds can be really tricky if you don’t have the schwa in your language, or simply if you’ve learnt and been using the full form for so long that that’s the one that comes naturally to you. Working on these weak forms is often one of the last pronunciation challenges my learners take on.“In’, having the short /ɪ/ sound, doesn’t tend to be reduced to schwa, so isn’t always considered a weak form, but that short /ɪ/ can get very short, with some speakers almost eliding it completely, or making a more schwa like sound. I would say you can think less about these /ɪ/ sounds, and you’ll notice that most of today’s weak forms are with schwa, but as last week I’d encourage you as last week to ensure that you are making that /ɪ/ as short as possible.
So, let’s practise those weak forms individually. First, I’ll read the strong and weak form. Listen and repeat:
a
of
Now just the weak form:
a
of
And now we’ll try them in the tongue twister:
A proper cup of coffee in a copper coffee pot.
You might notice that there are other things going on here too, for example the way the ‘p’ from ‘cup’ attaches itself to the schwa in ‘of’, or the ‘n’ of ‘in’ to the ‘a’. This is another example of catenation, which we spoke about briefly last season, and we’ll speak about in more detail another day.
Let’s move on to another rhyme we’ve looked at. Listen, and see if you can identify any weak forms:
A tutor who tooted the flute,
Tried to tutor two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it tougher to toot
Or to tutor two tooters to toot?"
(Carolyn Wells)
There, you should have identified “a”, “the”, “to” as weak forms with schwa, and possibly “is” and “it” as weak forms with /ɪ/. Don’t worry if you didn’t identify “the”, by the way: “the” is almost always a weak form, so much so that we think of that as being the full word! However, when you think that sometime we see “the”, you’ll see the difference.
Let’s just practise those weak forms with schwa – I’ll read both the full and weak forms, in the order in which they appear. Listen, and repeat:
a
the
to
Now listen and repeat line by line: again, you’ll hear some other features of connected speech going on here, all of which we’ll speak about more in future episodes.
A tutor who tooted the flute,
Tried to tutor two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it tougher to toot
Or to tutor two tooters to toot?"
…And now let’s try the whole thing. Listen, read with me if you can, and then repeat.
A tutor who tooted the flute,
Tried to tutor two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it tougher to toot
Or to tutor two tooters to toot?"
So, so far we’ve noted that grammar words tend to be unstressed. However, that doesn’t mean that all grammar words always take their weak form. If their meaning is important in the sentence, they are stressed. Think about the difference, for example, between “he can come” and “he CAN come”. The next rhyme is a great example of this. Again, listen the first time, and see if you can identify the weak forms.
A canner, exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to hisgranny,
“A canner can can
Anything that he can;
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?”
Here, you should have noticed that again “a” are “to” are reduced to schwa, as are “that” and “but”. You may also have considered “he” and “his” weak forms with /ɪ/. Finally, you should have heard that some “can”s were weak, and some were strong.
Let’s practise the weak form just of those words, in the order in which they appear. I’ll read the strong and weak form. Listen and repeat:
a
to
can
that
but
Listen and repeat line by line. Again, some other features of connected speech will be at play here:
A canner, exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to hisgranny,
“A canner can can
Anything that he can;
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?”
..And finally, try the full poem, again reading with me if you can, and then also during the pause by yourself.
A canner, exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to hisgranny,
“A canner can can
Anything that he can;
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?”
The question of when to reduce to a weak form and when to use a strong form of words like “can” is one we’ll come back to in a future episode on sentence stress, so don’t worry if that is still unclear to you!
If you’re interested in seeing which other words are reduced to weak forms, I’ve put a list of the most common ones in the script on Patreon, so head over there and take a look. The "Betty Botter" rhyme, which is in a video bonus there, is also a fantastic extra rhyme for these weak forms.