Contents Introducti

The elision of /a/

This can occur in several environments. In connected speech /э/ can easily disappear at word boundaries when the sound comes at the start of a word, positioned between two stressed syllables, as in:
go away / gao_ wei/ police /pli:s/

or when it is followed by a stressed syllable beginning with /r/ or /l/

Elision can also occur when the sound comes in the middle or final combinations as in: preferable /'prefrabl/ library /'laibri/

c) The loss of /h/

/h/ is lost in pronominal weak forms (i.e. the weak form of the pronoun) when they don't occur at the start of an utterance. As you can see from the example below, the /h/ of the two masculine pronouns is retained at the beginning of the sentence -'He', but gets elided when it occurs for a second time, in the middle of the sentence. He passed his exam is pronounced /hi pa:st iz ig'z^m/.

Vowel harmony. We all know that it is impossible to meet vowel harmony in English but is much active in other languages like Turkish Hungarian. So is useful
knowing about this. Harmony is a process whereby some segmental feature associates to all segments of a certain type in a specific domain. In the case of vowel harmony, all vowels in (roughly speaking) a word are required to agree with each other with respect to one of their properties. For example, in a language with palatal harmony, like Hungarian, every vowel in a word must be either front or back. This means, on the one hand, that all vowels of polysyllabic roots are either front or back and, on the other hand, that all affixes containing a vowel have two allomorphs, one with a front vowel and one with a back vowel (the choice of which depends on the root to which the affix is attached). In a language like this, roots are invariant; they control the harmonic set to which the vowels of the word belong and the affixes have to act as chameleons. This type of vowel harmony is referred to as root-controlled. I provide some examples from Hungarian:

(1)varos-ban 'in a/the city'

(2)falu-ba 'in a/the village
In other languages, however, the dominant systems, affixes may also control the harmony.


The phenomenon of vowel harmony is interesting for several reasons for any phonological theory or Dependency Phonology, however, there is an independently motivated level where vowels are in fact adjacent to each other. Since a vowel forms the head of the syllable that contains it, vowels in their function of syllable heads can be projected to a separate level where they can "see" each other. Consonants, on the other hand, cannot be projected in the same way, and this enables us to explain why consonant harmony of a similar sort does not exist. In a theory like this, the claim can be maintained that all phonological processes operate locally. Such a restriction constrains the number of possibl

grammars considerably, and this is the main reason why I chose to employ the representational theory of Government Phonology in this dissertation.

The theory of Feature Geometry can also account for the transparency of

consonants, but in a different way. In Clements' theory, vowels have a richer geometrical structure than consonants, because they possess the so-called 'V-place node' that consonants lack. Vowel features can thus skip consonants, because association is local at the tier of V-place nodes. The problem with this approach is that there is no independent motivation for the additional node contained by vowels, apart from the phenomenon to be explained, namely, the transparency of consonants to long-distance spreading of vocalic features. This problem is not encountered in Government Phonology.

Apart from the basic problem of transparency of intervening consonants, research on vowel harmony involves three main areas. The first concerns the question of what types of vowel harmonies exist in the world's languages, and which feature theory can account for this typology in the best way. According to modern theories of phonology, sounds can be divided into smaller ingredients, called distinctive features. Since vowel harmony involves the agreement of vowels within a certain domain with respect to a particular property, or feature, a given feature theory predicts that there are as many possible types of harmony as there are vocalic features recognised by the theory. Feature theories thus can be tested on the basis of whether they make correct predictions about the typology of vowel harmony systems. In this dissertation, I will argue that the feature theory of Government Phonology can account for the possible types of harmony.

The second issue concerns the domain of vowel harmony. This domain is

usually defined as the "word". One question we need to answer here is whether this domain is defined in terms of morphology or phonology (since members of compounds, for example, constitute separate harmonic spans); and if it is defined phonologically, whether it is a prosodic domain or something else. In this

dissertation (chapter 5), I will argue for a phonotactic definition of the domain of harmony; more precisely, that it coincides with the 'analytic domain' to be introduced shortly below. Another question concerns the existence of disharmonic roots and disharmonic affixes. The former can be exemplified by the root kosztum 'costume' in Hungarian, and the latter by the suffix -kor (cf. ot-kor 'at five o'clock', not * ot-kor). The domain of harmony should be defined in such a way that systematic characteristics of disharmonic strings are accounted for as well.

The third research area concerns neutral vowels. These are those vowels in a

given system that do not have a harmonic counterpart. Their neutrality is

manifested by the fact that they can co-occur with vowels of both harmonic sets. Affixes containing neutral vowels have only one allomorph, and they do not alternate depending on what type of root they are attached to. Not all neutral vowels behave in the same way, however. On the basis of their behaviour, two main types can be distinguished. One type is called 'transparent', because harmony goes through these vowels as if they were not there. That is, if a suffix vowel follows a stem that ends in a neutral vowel, the suffix vowel will harmonise with the non-neutral vowel to the left of the transparent vowel, so to speak ignoring what is intervening. The other type is called 'opaque', because these neutral vowels stop the harmony. In these cases, the following suffix vowel harmonises with the neutral vowel itself, ignoring what is preceding in the stem. The issue of transparent vowels is connected to the problem of locality mentioned above, because it seems as if harmony had 'skipped' the transparent vowels. Van der Hulst & Smith solve this problem, and they further claim that the two types of behaviour exhibited by neutral vowels can be predicted from the segmental make-up of these vowels themselves. In this dissertation, I will test their theory, and show that not all the possibilities predicted by them actually occur in the world's languages. I will propose that it is possible to predict which possibilities do not occur if we take into account certain properties of the vowel systems involved

The research made into the nature of English monophthongs, diphthongs and diphthongoids gives me the ground to conclude the following:

1. Human speech can be broken down into units called sounds which can be put together to form syllables, words and utterances.

2. In the spoken form of the language speech sounds change their qualities, we observe modifications of both vowels and consonants.

3. The most wide-spread phonetic phenomena of connected speech that happen with vowels are reduction and elision.

Possible Mistakes of Uzbek Learners.

1. Uzbek students of English do not shorten or obscure unstressed vowels in the cases they should be strongly reduced, e.g. forget [fə'get], of course [əv'ko:s].

2. Uzbek students of English easily reduce the vowels of full value in unstressed positions, they often substitute them by the neutral sound in the cases where there should be no reduction at all, eg blackboard ['blækbo:d]; architect ['a:kitəkt].
3. Uzbek learners do not always observe secondary stress in polysyllabic words and reduce the vowel of full value. Care should be taken to observe the rhythmical tendency of secondary stresses and to pronounce the vowel of full value in the syllables marked by secondary stresses, eg conversation [,konvə'seiƒn], revolution [,revə'lu:ƒn].
Any good dictionary can not help us in the three cases mentioned above.

4. Form-words and especially personal and possessive pronouns, auxiliary and modal verbs are often (made) strongly stressed by the Uzbeks, though they have no special logical prominence. Mind that those words are normally unstressed and are very weak in English speech.

5. Uzbek students of English fail to use weak forms correctly. On the one hand they introduce strong forms in unstressed positions. On the other hand they replace strong forms by weak forms in places where there should be no reduction in the

unstressed position. Careful practice of form-words in various accentual patterns is desirable.

Recommendations.

1. Reduced vowels should be made very weak. Sometimes they are even dropped in fluent speech, e.g. factory ['faktri].

2. Unknown words especially compound and borrowed should be looked up in a dictionary to check their pronunciation. Be sure not to reduce vowels of full value in the unstressed position, unless you are to do so.
3. When practising reading as well as speaking weaken unstressed form-words, personal and possessive pronouns, auxiliary and modal verbs whenever it is necessary.