The noun "territory" can be both countable and uncountable, so "an occupied territory" and "unoccupied territory" are both complete noun phrases. The first vowels of the noun phrases are both schwa if they occur as part of normal speech. This may pose a problem in differentiating the two phrases (in fact, when I said "XYZ is an occupied territory" to my wife, she thought that I'd said "XYZ is unoccupied territory," which resulted in a lot of confusion).
I am aware of a few tactics to avoid such confusion:
- One could stress "an" or "un-", which then would have different vowels. But I suspect if that would sound unnatural.
- Alternatively, one could paraphrase the sentence so the noun phrases wouldn't occur. For instance, I could have said "XYZ is occupied by ABC." This may not be easy or possible especially on the fly.
Is there a better way of differentiating such pairs of noun phrases?