Summary Details
| Query: |
Intrusive Liquids in English
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| Author: | Katalin Balogné Bérces | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Phonology
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| Summary: |
Dear Linguists,
I got the most comments in connection with Cockney and its pronunciation of ''Paul arrived''. It seems generally agreed upon that it's not possible for vocalization (if it applies at all) of ''Paul'' to trigger R-sandhi in ''Paul arrived'', as does not delete altogether but turns into a /w/ or /U/ (a (lax) high back (rounded or unrounded) vowel), which does not trigger linking/intrusive-R. (But see below for the ''tickle him'' example.) In another possible pronunciation the does not vocalize and surfaces as a (linking) , in which case, of course, no R-sandhi is expected again. A. F. Gupta explains this as the result of the fact that in L-vocalising dialects the phoneme is still present (although notice that it is exactly in the intrusive-L dialects I'm asking about that the underlying status of the becomes debatable, similarly to that of the /r/ in intrusive-R accents). Chris Lucas points out that in ''Paul arrived'' there may be some kind of longer-distance environment effects, too: the closely following /r/ may also support L-linking. Alex Bellem also says that this example is perhaps not the best because of the closely following /r/ in ''arrived'', in addition, in fast / non-careful speech the first vowel of ''arrived'' would probably elide so that the /w/ at the end of ''Paul'' and the now adjacent /r/ would be harder to tell apart. She then refers to accents of British English in which /r/ sounds more like /w/ (e.g. the TV presenter Jonathan Ross, who gets called Jonathan Woss because his /r/ is fairly close to /w/) -- for such speakers, and certainly in fast / very casual speech, syllable-final /r/ and (vocalized to /w/) are pretty-well merged anyway. Unfortunately I didn't receive any data about other accents of English which are both non-rhotic and L-vocalizing, especially ones where there's some merger of vowels before syllable-final and /r/ (like my lame example with ''Paul'' and ''law'' above), but I suspect that once an accent is non-rhotic, it develops intrusive-R first and then no intrusive-L is able to emerge. I think (and this is not a novel idea) that the primary drive behind the emergence of intrusive liquids in English dialects is hiatus filling. The choice of the hiatus filler is determined by the first term of the hiatus, and glides are used to cover the vowel space accordingly. In all accents of English, the high area of the vowel space is covered (high front glide /j/, high back glide /w/), and in most non-rhotic accents /r/ is used as a kind of ''third glide'' to cover the non-high area (= linking/intrusive-R). In certain (= L-vocalizing) rhotic accents is used as the ''third glide'' to cover the non-high area (= linking/intrusive-L). What happens in accents which are both non-rhotic and L-vocalizing is that historically, R-dropping (together with Linking/Intrusive-R) precedes L-vocalization, so the non-high area is already covered by /r/. Word-final can NOT be replaced with an /r/ in sandhi in cases like ''Paul arrived'' (by analogy to ''law and order''), because either the remains in the underlying representation and is pronounced as a (clear/light) Linking-L; or it is lexicalized as a high back offglide in /aw/ (esp. in broad Cockney), and as such it triggers hiatus filling with /w/. Up to date, I've found one exception: Christian Uffmann (2008: 8) shows that in younger SE British English, syllabic vocalizes as a non-high (''lax'') /U/ and triggers R-intrusion: /tsIkUrIm/ 'tickle him'. (Cf. the fact that even in other clear/dark-L-systems syllabic is always dark, it never links to the following morpheme!) In fact, in connection with R-sandhi, two opposite processes seem to be present in the accents of English: on the one hand, with the emergence of ''new'' non-high vowels (esp. resulting from the smoothing of the diphthongs in ''now'', ''fair'', ''rear'', ''pure'') R-sandhi spreads to new environments; on the other hand, however, in certain accents/registers R-sandhi is slowly receding: as also remarked by Mark Jones and Philip Carr in their replies, R-sandhi appears to be disappearing in favour of a glottal hiatus marker, more and more frequently even linking-R is avoided. P.S. A piece of data coming from Chris Lucas, which may or may not be related (you are invited to decide): in London/Cockney, the monosyllabic short form of the name Sharon (cf. Bill < William) is pronounced identically to the word ''shall'', ending in the same glide. Reference: Uffmann, Christian (2008) 'Incursions of the idiosyncratic' as faithfulness optimization. Handout of paper presented at the 16th Manchester Phonology Meeting, 22-24 May 2008. |
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| LL Issue: | 19.3236 | |
| Date Posted: | 27-Oct-2008 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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