Phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet

Word-level patterns
/ə/ does not occur in stressed syllables.
/ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in native English words, although it can occur
syllable-initially as in luxurious /lʌɡˈʒʊəriəs/ in American English, and at the start of
borrowed words such as genre.
/m/, /n/, /l/ and, in 
rhotic varieties
, /r/ can be the syllable nucleus (i.e. a 
syllabic
consonant
) in an unstressed syllable following another consonant, especially /t/, /d/, /s/
or /z/. Such syllables are often analyzed phonemically as having an underlying /ə/ as the
nucleus. See above under 
Consonants
.
The short vowels are 
checked vowels
, in that they cannot occur without a coda in a word-
final stressed syllable. (This does not apply to /ə/, which does not occur in stressed
syllables as mentioned above.)
The 
prosodic
features of English – stress, rhythm, and intonation – can be described as
follows.
Prosody

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