Weak Forms

So, what are weak forms? Well, we need to first understand what word stress is! Let’s take a word like ‘police’. There are two syllables in police. The stressed syllable is on ‘-lice’, the second syllable. So, the first syllable is not stressed., it’s a weak form. So it sounds like a schwa! /pə/ not /pəʊliːs/. police /pəʊliːs/.

So, that’s one thing you need to know, it’s stress in words, which syllable is stressed. We’ll come back to that later. But, what about stress in a sentence, how does that work? Well, English is not really an efficient language. For example, if I say to you: “want coffee” it may sound like a caveman. But ,you understand, everyone understands that I want a coffee. “I” and “a” are not very important words, right?

So, in a natural sentence those unimportant words also have weak forms. In weak forms, the vowel sounds are replaced with schwa sounds. So, for example “I want a coffee”. “I” and “a”. Again they’re not important. So, they would be reduced to schwa sound. “Want” and “coffee”. They’re the important bits of information in the sentence, so we’ll pronounce them correctly. The whole thing would sound like this : “I want a coffee” /ə wɒnt ə kɒfi/.

Again, the vowel sounds, they replaced by schwa. I= /ə/ want= /wɒnt /. a= /ə /. Coffee /kɒfi/. “I want a coffee” /ə wɒnt ə kɒfi/. You say it with me., repeats it with me. “I want a coffee”. “I want a coffee” /ə wɒnt ə kɒfi/. Okay, but how about words with more than one syllable?

We need to think about sentence stress AND word stress. So, how about if- “police coming”. So, if I said: “police coming” we both understand “the police are coming”. We don’t need “the” and “are”, they will be weak forms.

Reducing the vowel sounds to schwa sound, so: “the police”, remember that “police” we still got that weak syllable on “po-“ “-lice”. “The Police” “are” “are” coming reduced /ə/. /ə/ /coming/ “the police are coming.” “The police are coming.” That’s where you get your sentence stress. That’s where you get your intonation from. So, for example, a question like “do you fancy a beer?” could sound like /dʒə/ fancy /ə/ beer? Again., what are the important words? “fancy” “beer”. I think, correct me if I’m wrong. I think Americans don’t use the word fancy. It just means “want”.

So, for example: “fancy beer?”. The whole question: “do you fancy a beer?” “do /dʒə/ you fancy a /ə/ beer?” “do /dʒə/ you fancy a /ə/ beer?” “Do you fancy a beer?” Okay, let’s put all of that together. You’ll see sentences come up on the screen. You try and say it then hear me say it, then you repeat it in the correct way.

What’d you do yesterday? I went to the cinema. What you see? Just a romance movie. Who’d you go with? A web with your girlfriend. You went with my girlfriend.

So, you see you could also stress a particular word depending on what you want to focus on the sentence to be.