Angle Heart, a Facebook Page fan, requested more information about strong and weak forms. This is so easy to teach in person, and so hard to write about, because strong and weak forms are about sounds, not written words.
You’ll find lots of lessons on the internet describing when to use a strong form and when to use a weak form. I think they’re usually written by English speakers who hope to describe all the forms and generalize them into “rules”.
Perhaps the problem lies, in part, in the terms we use: “strong” and “weak” forms. They really aren’t forms. To my mind, they might be better described as dynamics or strategies, because in English they’re adjustable.
The sound of English relies on contrasts in sound. We create contrasts in our speaking that act like sign-posts, I call them “soundposts” ©™, which signal to the listener what they should pay close attention to and remember, versus what they should hear and understand but not remember as notable. There are at least 5 ways we make adjustments to create clear contrasts of strong and weak sounds:
Clarity
The vowels in beat, bit, bet, but, boot, bat, bite, bait, bought, and boat all require careful articulation, because the vowels are the only thing that makes these words different. Each word has a different meaning, and each is only different from the other because of its vowel sound. For the sake of your listener, you must make each of these vowels clear enough to be recognized.
But the role of vowels in a multi-syllable word e.g. “accident” is to help create contrast between syllables. This word has a particular soundprint©™ (like a footprint in wet sand, its shape is obvious to our ear); it has a strongly stressed first syllable [aek] in which the vowel must be clear, followed by the second, less-stressed syllable [s?], in which the vowel /i/ is weakened to a schwa; and in the third syllable, the vowel /e/ seems to disappear completely from the sound [dnt]. This creates acoustic contrast: Clear First Syllable vs. Fuzzy Second and Third. Strong First Syllable vs. Weak Second and Third.Stressed First Syllable vs. Unstressed Second and Third.
Remember—this is spoken English, not written English. Native English speakers learn to adjust the contrast of syllables long before they learn to read and write. They learn the tools to signal changes in their messages, that signal importance. These sound signals, or sound-posts©™ as I call them, , are the way we organize our messages for our listeners, when there is no printed word to be read and referenced.
Duration
We usually stretch the vowel out longer in a stressed syllable. Look at the word accident again: although the first syllable only has two sounds, [ae, k], it is given a longer duration than either of the following syllables. By stretching it out, and shortening the unstressed syllables, we hear the word’s soundprint©™–it’s characteristic sound shape. When we shorten the unstressed syllables, we often swallow some of the sounds.
Pitch
We pitch a word or syllable higher if we want to stress it, and we pitch it lower if we want to downplay or weaken it. In the word accident, the first syllable is on a higher pitch than the others. There is a wave to the sound that starts higher and ends lower. This frequent, specific pitch adjustment is difficult for Spanish speakers.
Volume
The same is true for volume. We increase the volume or energy of our voice on the first syllable of accident, and lower the volume or energy on the following syllables.
This contrast-building happens at every level of sound in English:
- we have strong vowels and weak vowels: we even change strong vowels to make them weaker, if they occur in unstressed syllables of words. This is why you have to study about the schwa. We change vowels that are too strong to schwa or short I if they occur in an unstressed syllable of a word.
- we have strong consonants that we keep strong in stressed syllables of words, but we downplay those same consonants when they occur in unstressed syllables of words
- we create strong and weak syllables: we stress one or two syllables but downplay the others, depending on the word
- we create strong and weak words: we stress new or critical information in a sentence, and downplay the known information or the grammatical markers
- we create strong and weak sentences: we stress ideas that introduce and develop our topic, and downplay those statements that merely carry the topic forward without anything new or remarkable.
I’ve spent most of this post talking about vowels, consonants, and syllables because few teachers try to explain strong vs. weak at the pronunciation level, but keep in mind these ideas about “soundprints” and “soundposts” as you look at other material on the internet. We make contrasts using pitch, duration, clarity, volume, and energy.
I hope I haven’t made this harder to understand. It’s not as complex or complicated as you might think. If you have questions, or I can clarify in some way, please ask. I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback, because I’ll be publishing all of this in the near future. Any suggestions or requests would be welcome!
Finally, I came across this question on a forum asking whether to use strong and weak forms when reading a text; quite a few people responded.
