Pronunciation of articles in English

[Igel]

8. My speech prefers schwa before everything but a stressed vowel.

"thuh hour"

"thee hourly newscast."

We're not talking about citation-form stress, but full stress after resolution of stress clash and stress reduction to show noun phrase boundaries. So "hourly" may officially have initial stress, but in "hourly newscast" the word "hourly" has scant secondary stress. The /i/ in "the" is reduced in any event.

It's a hiatus resolution strategy, to avoid schwa next to a (non-high front) stressless vowel (which tends to be phonetically reduced anyway).

As soon as I say, "no, not the 6 pm newscast, but the HOURly newscast," the schwa is back and anything else sounds weird.

However, as soon as I swap out "hourly" for "evening," "thuh evening news" with stress on "news" is fine. Don't want the two high front vowels in hiatus any more than I want two reduced non-front non-high vowels in hiatus.