"that"

Question

Hi,My dictionary says the weak form of 'that' (with a schwa) only appears as a conjunction.i.e. She said that the story was true.But I also occasionally hear 'that' pronounced in the weak form when it's a pronoun, such as in "That's mine."Do you say 'that' in the weak form even when it's not a conjunction?Thanks in anticipation.

Kooyeen · Accepted Answer

I was going to say NO! (dictionaries for learners say that the weak form is only a conjunction, and American Accent Training says so too) but I just checked on Merriam Webster, and a weak form is listed for the pronoun too... so, if it's listed there, someone must say it, sometimes, somewhere. I never paid attention to that though... but maybe I heard it, because when I tried to pronounce "that's mine" as "thut's mine" it didn't sound totally impossible to me... so I checked and that pronunciation is actually in Merriam Webster.

Anonymous · Answer

Hello

Firstly, 'that' can belong to three kinds of different word classes

1) demonstrative pronoun That's my car over there.
2) relative pronoun The car that I bought is red.
3 subordinate conjunction He says that my car looks stupid.

As a rule – though I don't think you can ever make a rule for this – I would say that

- dem. ****. is nearly always strong, especially when it's contracted with a verb.

- both the relative pronoun and subordinate conjunction are pronounced weak most of the time.

You can check this. If you do you will find that it sounds very natural, or at least that's what I thought.

However, these are never set rules. 'Speed' and 'emphasis' play major roles in this.

For example, when people pronounce a sentence word by word, they will naturally tend to
use citation pronunciation, or, alternatively said, they will only use the strong forms of words.

It probably has to do with redundancy as well, which means that some words in a sentence
are more important for conveying the main message of the sentence than others. Perhaps a stupid example of this could be the scene in 'Finding Nemo' in which a dozen of seagulls shout
''mine, mine, mine, mine...''. Very funny scene. But the point is that the entire sentence of which 'mine' has been derived is 'That is mine'. So despite the fact that both the subject and
predicator have been omitted, you can still understand very easily what is meant. And this contributes to the use of strong and weak forms too I think.

I hope this was helpful.

Jordy

Christanford · Answer

Thank you very much for your help, Jordy and Kooyeen! <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' alt='Emotion: smile'/>

"that"

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