The "elusive" English neutral soundin the speech of the British
The article considers the phonemic status of the neutral vowel / ə / in British English The neutral sound /ə/ (''schwa'') is one of the most common and disputable English sounds. The phonemic status of this vowel has not been settled yet. According to its position in the word ''schwa'' can be characterised as an ''elusive'' vowel: either being an allophone of some phoneme, or having different sound colouring, or being omitted at all (known as compression or schwa deletion). Some linguists consider that the neutral sound /ə/ is widespread due to the specific rhythmic organisation of the English language resulting in the recurrence of stressed syllables at equal intervals of time. If a speaker wants to increase the speech tempo, he or she reduces the distance between the stressed syllables by omitting the unstressed ones. It is worth mentioning that nowadays linguists have discovered an opposite phenomenon of decompression that has become popular among the speakers of British English resulting in the appearance of an extra syllable due to the epenthetic /ə/ between the noise consonant and the sonorant in the middle of some words. The author comes to the conclusion that such peculiar features of the neutral sound /ə/ prove the fact of the complicated nature and constant variability of the modern British English vowel system.