Schwa insertion for emphasis

I'm afraid I can't help you, as my schwa escaped a few weeks ago because the local postman left the compound gate open.

You haven't seen it, have you?

Calling it a schwa is misleading. Someone emphasizing a word by making two syllables of a one syllable word would say "gerrr-ate" and "kuhhh-razy," which is to say that they emphasize by adding a phoneme to the beginning of the word, and it won't necessarily be a schwa. It can also be seen with multisyllabic words, such as "dee-lighted." In none of those examples is the initial phoneme a schwa.

Many thanks for your helpful comment. Should there be a regional difference in making a monosyllabic word disyllabic in American English? That is to mean that Americans on the West Coast do so whereas they do not on the East Coast.

To use a common American expression, that would be opening a whole can of worms--meaning an extremely complex situation. In each region of the United States, there will be differences in pronunciation, as well as means of expressing emphasis. Click here to visit a thread in which people, mostly Americans, discuss how they pronounce the same words differently. On the last few pages, for example, people discuss how they pronounce the word sandwich. One member states:



To which another member who grew up in New Jersey responds:



"Boida" refers to a member named Roberta, whose name is pronounced "Raboida" in New York City and parts of New Jersey.

There are people from Maine (far northeast) whose speech is almost incomprehensible to Southerners, and a good many other Americans. There are people from the coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia (the far southeast) whose speech is incomprehensible to most other Americans, including other Southerners. Even within regions, certain vocabulary and pronunciations are unique to particular districts.

There are some broad generalities--most southerners say IN-surance, while most Northerners say in-SUR-ance. By and large, though, there are hundreds of regional dialects, with both subtle and gross distinctions from other dialects, and that includes pronunciations intended for emphasis. People from rural parts of the state of Louisiana (the southwestern part of the Old South) will emphasize the word guarantee by saying "I gare-ON-tee ya . . ." People in other regions would say: "I gare-un-damn-tee ya . . . " It would be a lifetime's work just to catalog all the particular dialects.

For emphasizing those word, it would be pretty much a universal thing for all English dialects. This would happen all over the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England, South Africa, Ghana, ... .

Of course, as Set noted, there are many many different pronunciations.

Helpful commnet! As you wrote in the previous reply, the word 'gurantee' /ˌgerənˈti:/ is emphatically pronounced with 'I gare-ON-tee ya . . .' in rural parts of Louisiana. I assume that you've heard of it in the U.S. What phonetic alphabet can the capital 'O' in 'gare-ON-tee' be transcribed? This is my curiosity.

Hi. Have you heard people in the north-eastern regions of the U.S. inserting the schwa for emphasis? The emphatic form in (1) becomes disyllabic whereas the other one in (2) becomes trisyllabic. Some young people in Los Angeles pronounce these for emphasis.

E.g.
(1) great /ˈgreɪt/ → gareat! /gə.ˈreɪt/
(2) sleepy /ˈsli:pi/ → saleepy! /ˈsə.li:pi/

I prefer to insert the epenthesis.