in syllable-final position. Onset clusters ending in are followed by or its variants (see note 5 above). Long vowels and diphthongs are not found before , except for the mimetic words boing and oink, unassimilated foreign words such as Burmese aung and proper names such as Taung, and American-type pronunciations of words like strong (which have or ). The short vowels occur before only in assimilated non-native words such as ginseng and Song (name of a Chinese dynasty) or non-finally in some dialects in words like strength and length as well as in varieties without the foot-strut split. is rare in syllable-initial position (although in the northern half of England, is used for and is common at the start of syllables). Stop + before (all presently or historically ) are excluded. Sequences of + C1 + V̆ + C1, where C1 is a consonant other than and V̆ is a short vowel, are virtually nonexistent. Word-level patterns does not occur in stressed syllables, unless it is merged with another vowel as in some varieties. does not occur in word-initial position in native English words, although it can occur syllable-initially as in luxurious in American English, and at the start of borrowed words such as genre. , , and, in rhotic varieties, can be the syllable nucleus (i.e. a syllabic consonant) in an unstressed syllable following another consonant, especially , , or . Such syllables are often analyzed phonemically as having an underlying 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 , which does not occur in stressed syllables as mentioned above.) Prosody The prosodic features of English – stress, rhythm, and intonation – can be described as follows. Prosodic stress Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis. According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under above), English normally has prosodic stress on the final stressed syllable in an intonation unit. This is said to be the origin of the distinction traditionally made at the lexical level between primary and secondary stress: when a word like admiration (traditionally transcribed as something like ) is spoken in isolation, or at the end of a sentence, the syllable ra (the final stressed