Topic-076: Unstressed Syllables A vowel may take one out of three forms stressed, unstressed and reduced. Most of the time a vowel is completely pronounced when it is in a stressed syllable but the same vowel is different in quality (allophonic form) when it takes place in an unstressed syllable, and, of course, it is reduced to another form when it is in a reduced syllable. Remember that inmost cases, various reduced vowels are taking the shape of a schwa vowel / ə/. The symbol /ə/ maybe used to show many types of vowels with a central, reduced vowel quality. A vowel in an unstressed syllable does not necessarily have a completely reduced quality. All the English vowels can occur in unstressed syllables in their full, unreduced forms and not all but many of them can occur in all possible three forms.
