This paper deals with English vowel reduction and focuses on what is generally referred to as the Arab Rule (Ross 1972 i.a.). Vowels tend to reduce if the preceding syllable is light, whereas they do not reduce if the preceding syllable is heavy. Our purpose is twofold: first, based on the scrutiny of Wells (2008), we evaluate the efficiency of the Arab Rule and show that is empirically verified. Second, we propose an analysis of blocking contexts couched within CVCV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996). We use two central notions such as Government and Licensing, and show that vowel reduction only applies to "governing-and-governable" vowels.

中文翻译：

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没有脚的英语“阿拉伯规则”

本文讨论英语元音的减少，并着重于通常被称为阿拉伯规则（Ross 1972 ia）的东西。如果前一个音节很轻，元音往往会减少，而如果前一个音节很重，元音不会减少。我们的目的是双重的：首先，在对Wells（2008）的审查基础上，我们评估了阿拉伯规则的有效性，并证明了这一点已得到了经验验证。其次，我们提出了对CVCV语音学中阻塞语境的分析（Lowenstamm 1996）。我们使用了两个中心概念，例如“政府”和“许可”，并表明减少元音仅适用于“可管理”的元音。