Pretonic alphabetic o in Present-day English

Abstract

This article is concerned with the question of why, when immediately preceding primary stress, orthographic o is as a rule phonetically realized not only as the diphthongs /əʊ/, /oʊ/ but also as the qualitatively reduced short monophthong /ə/. For example, l/əʊˈ/cation ∼ l/əˈ/cation. It is argued that the instability of alphabetic o in this position is mainly due to 1) its frequent occurrences in intertonic position (e.g., ˌcompoˈnential), in which it is surrounded by two stressed syllables; 2) derivation from forms in which stress occurs upon the short monophthongs /ɒ/, /ɑ/ (e.g., Roberta ← Robert + -a); 3) a relatively small number of formations such as co-sponsor or pro-choice, in which alphabetic o belongs to a semantically transparent prefix; and 4) frequent use of the single letter o (to orthographically represent alphabetic o) rather than a combination of letters such as, e.g., ow. Additionally, this paper argues that the American English diphthong /oʊˈ/ is in general more stable than the British English diphthong /əʊˈ/ because American English is in general a more conservative variety, which to a larger extent than British English respects the etymological history of a word.