Citation form refers to the pronunciation of a word when spoken in isolation.

• A. True
• B. False
• C. It refers to spelling
• D. It refers to sentence stress

Answer: (A)

Citation form is the pronunciation of a word when spoken in isolation—the careful, dictionary-style way the word sounds by itself, before any effects of surrounding sounds or sentence rhythm come into play. This is the reference pronunciation linguists use to describe how the word should sound on its own, often shown in IPA. In real speech, sounds can shift with neighboring sounds, vowels can reduce, and timing changes occur as part of connected speech; those variations are not the citation form, but how the word typically sounds in context. So the statement is correct because it captures that the citation form is about pronunciation when the word is spoken in isolation. It’s not about spelling, and it’s not about which word in a sentence gets the stress; those relate to orthography and sentence rhythm, respectively.