Weak & strong forms is probably one of the most striking features of the English language. Many foreigners still fail to pronounce correctly after many years of studying English: a remarkable fact!
I have been lecturing on English Phonetics for a long time now but it still calls my attention and my students´ even more, every time I teach the weak forms to them. It is really surprising for students to learn that the simplest sentence «I´m coming» becomes /m 'kʌmɪŋ/ or «those are books» becomes /ðəʊz ər bʊkz/.
I have come to ascertain that, in Argentina at least, many students and even graduates from Training Colleges and Universities are sometimes unable to understand a song in English. That becomes a big frustration to them after they have been studying English for so many years.
I took the task to search myself with my students in our Phonetics courses and I found out that students get very uncomfortable when they are asked about their understanding of any modern song they listen in.
On the other hand, I do not know why Lecturers and Teachers in general, do not draw the attention of students to this easy but so sensitive fact about strong & weak forms.
This paper is just a guideline to encourage students and English learners in general to break the barrier of inhibition and train their ears to a more relaxed way of understanding the spoken language. Understanding the spoken language should become the first enjoyment in the learning of a foreign language.
Before we go ahead with the weak forms, some theory is essential to set our starting point.
Stress: it is a very illusive matter to properly describe. Phonetically speaking, stress is perceived as an extra effort in the production of a sound element. This prominence is usually put down to pitch, duration, loudness or even quality. In fact, some outstanding linguists have preferred to define stress as an extra effort (production) and loudness (perception) and leave the word accent for other sorts of prominence.
From a phonology point of view, we need to tell between «word stress» and «sentence stress». In word stress we can find at least three levels of stress:
a) One to carry the nuclear tone
b) One to show weak stress
c) One to act in an intermediary position
The rules for word stress are likely to be learned along with each word. The English stress system is a complicated one by nature of its evolution: Teutonic (early stress) and Roman (late stress). As a rule, we know where to expect word stress in isolated words. However more important to any foreigner learning English is the fact of sentence stress. Language is not merely a matter of sounds of words in isolation. Language is concerned with running speech and such characteristic features as elision, assimilation, gradation, liason, etc. Those features along with intonation, rhythm and stress make up the prosodic or suprasegmental features of the language, being highly overlaid on the segmentals «vowels & consonants».
It is suprasegmentals that give a language its characteristic quality which enables us to identify a spoken language although we may be unable to distinguish individual words. Pronunciation is then regarded not only as the ability to produce isolated sounds. Sounds always occur in a context. Without stress, rhythm and intonation our conversation would become flat and ambiguous.
First and foremost, we do clearly need to distinguish between an outstanding feature of the English language vs Spanish.
Spanish is a syllable - stressed language. This means that every syllable carries the same amount of time regardless whether they are stressed or not. For example: «Desolado» /de' so' la' do/.
English is a stress - timed language. Stressed syllables occur at regularly spaced intervals, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables in between. There is less time for each stressed syllable in proportion to the number of unstressed syllables occurring between stressed ones: words are run together and consequent contraction occurs. This is the main (or we may say the only one) cause that brings on problems to the Spanish ears. Spanish speakers get frustrated whenever they fail to understand the spoken language which they would recognize perfectly well in either its written or false (rhythmically incorrect) version.
The change we can easily perceive in the sound of some words has been termed gradation. Gradation is almost always produced by a monosyllabic grammatical word that connects words or sentences to each other. As they are connecting words, they seldom occur in isolation. These unstressed forms are commonly referred to as the weak forms. There are about thirty five or so of these gradation words. Gradation words have two forms: the weak or connecting function and the strong or isolated form. A common and easy example: The alphabet «a» /ei/, «b» / bi:/, etc. However we utter «a book» /ə bʊk/.
Weak forms are limited in number but their occurrence, in terms of discourse frequency, is overwhelmingly more common than strong forms. They are among the most used and common words of the English language. They must be regarded as the foundation in the language learning activity. If the ultimate purpose of English learning is to acquire the fluency and understanding of the language, then the mastery of these weak forms becomes imperative for teachers to explain and use them properly in practical every day speech.
There is another phenomenon which we refer to as reduction: contracted forms. They have historically been caused by the same crowding together of unstressed syllables between stressed ones (isn´t – must´ve been – shouldn´t ´ve been, etc.) It is still amazing why teachers pay so much attention and practice to contracted forms while weak forms are neglected in the same proportion.
The lack of transfer (omission of weak forms) brings about the incorrect pronunciation and difficulty in the understanding of the spoken language.
I detail below the most usual words having strong weak & weak forms in their pronunciation. In every case an example is provided. It is remarkable the use of Schwa in many of the weak forms. This is so because the Schwa sound is of a very short duration, so short in fact that it may disappear completely. It is its neutral position which leads us to think of it as a vague vowel. The production of Schwa should not present difficulties to the Spanish speaking learner of English, other than a possible tendency to lip rounding and an insufficiently short articulation, both of which are easily corrected.
