Among the numerous factors known or suspected to affect the length of a syllable in English is the nature of the immediately following syllable. It is widely recognized (P. Fijn van Draat, 1910, p. 14; Jones, 1956, §§ 886–7; Bolinger, 1965, pp. 168–9; Lehiste, 1972, p. 2021) that in a succession of monosyllabic words a word containing a full vowel will be longer when followed by another such word than when followed by a word containing a reduced vowel. 1 Van Draat's example is Money makes the mare to go versus Money makes the mare go : in the latter, ‘We pronounce mare in two syllables.’ In the former one can say that the reduced to ‘borrows time’ from the full mare .
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Dasher et al. (1982) studied this question.
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