Abstrakt
The study focuses on pronunciation of certain monosyllabic structural words in spoken texts that are typically reduced or weak, i.e., the words that exhibit the lowest degree of prominence in the metrical structure of an English utterance. Speech recordings of continuous texts produced twelve speakers (6 Czech + 6 British) were used, each in the length of about 4 minutes or 40 to 50 breath-groups.
The sample comprised 1439 weak-form words. Structural and durational data were retrieved and statistical differences between Czech and British speakers of English were found.
Interestingly, apart from general tendencies, each of the observed words displayed specific idiosyncrasies.