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Unread Jan 12th, 2015, 09:14 am
susan53 susan53 is offline
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Default Re: American English Word Stress

"be" is only the copula ( a linking verb necessary in English for grammatical reasons), not a "content" word, so would be unlikely to be stressed. Only the adjective frank would be likely to carry stress, unless of course there was a contrastive element implied by one of the other words. So the most likely pronunciation would be :

/kən_aɪ bɪ 'fræŋk/ or even /kən_ə bɪ 'fræŋk/

with "I" and "be" also subject to vowel reduction as they are in unstressed position. If any other word was stressed, (contrastive stress aside) it would probably be "can"

/kæn_ə bɪ 'fræŋk/

Incidentally, this is a matter of sentence stress rather than word stress, and it's phonemic rather than phonetic script - but the answer remains the same It doesn't make much difference in this case whether it's US English or any other variety, either.
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Last edited by susan53 : Jan 13th, 2015 at 02:30 am.
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