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Microskills - Weak Forms of Function Words

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4 views7 pages

Microskills - Weak Forms of Function Words

Uploaded by

Sam Quinn
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Microskills - Weak forms of

function words
PSE 101
Retrieval - Weak Forms. What do you know?
Weak forms are syllable sounds that become unstressed in connected speech and are often pronounced as a schwa.
These weak form words are typically function words such as auxiliary verbs, modals, conjunctions, pronouns, articles, linkers and prepositions. Function words are not usually stressed, and are reduced to keep the stress pattern regular

Like “than”, weak forms are found in “grammar words” like prepositions and auxiliary verbs. We
presumably pronounce them less clearly because they are not content words and so don’t carry most of the
meaning of the sentence, and deemphasising them helps the content words stand out more. For example, in
the sentence “The pig ate some pies”, you can more or less understand it by just catching the stressed
content words “pig ate pies”, with much less need for the unstressed words “the some”.

Grammar words which commonly appear in weak forms include (in approximate order of importance when
teaching this point):

● auxiliary verbs, including modal verbs (can, was, were, has, could, do, does, been, must, etc)
● prepositions (than, at, for, from, of, to, as, there, etc)
● articles/ determiners (a, the, some, etc)
● pronouns and possessive adjectives (her, your, you, them, us, she, etc)
● linking words (and, but, that, because, etc)

Such weak forms almost always have the same schwa sound as at the end of “computer”. There are also
some examples with /i/ like the /bin/ pronunciation of “been”, but so few that /i/ can be left out of the
presentation stage to simplify things.
Task 5.1
Task 5.2
Task 5.3
Unit Summary
Homework

Critical analysis of your texts by Friday.

Reflections from yesterday’s lesson by Friday - Discussion thread.

MS Forms - daily

Weekly study of the academic word lists.

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