Key at bottom of page.
Commentary
I:
Although I is a monosyllabic
function/grammatical word and is usually unstressed, it doesn’t usually have a
weak form.
always:
Certain high-frequency words have a variant without /l/ when the /l/ is
preceded by /ɔː/ and followed by another consonant, e.g. always, almost, already, alright, etc.
The variants /-wɪz/ and /-weɪz/ appear
to be roughly equally frequent in the General British (GB) accent.
people:
Phonemically, the final syllable of people
is /əl/. When this syllable is preceded by /p/, however, the schwa /ə/ isn't
pronounced. Instead the articulators move directly from the position for /p/ to
the position for /l/. This is easy to do in the case of /p/ because /p/ is
articulated with the two lips and /l/ is articulated with the tongue-tip. These
articulators can move independently of each other and so when the lips move
apart to release the /p/, the tongue tip is already in position for the /l/ and
no intervening schwa /ə/ occurs.
Note that in English, syllabic /l/ is
not a phoneme in its own right, but merely a special way of realising the
syllable /əl/. This means that when we use a special symbol [l̩] for it in
transcription, it makes our transcription non-phonemic (because we are now using
more than one symbol for each phoneme and introducing a special symbol to show
a particular phonetic detail).
to:
When unstressed, as it usually is, to
has the weak form /tə/ when the immediately following word begins with a
consonant. This is true for both the preposition, e.g. Go to hell /ˈɡəʊ tə ˈhel/, and the 'to infinitive', e.g. Go to see /ˈɡəʊ tə ˈsiː/.
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