Re: USAGE: indefinite "a" before vowel-initial words

further to the earlier discussion...

I took the opportunity to listen to the speech of an elderly
White woman from N Carolina on a TV documentary today. Her
accent was of course nonrhotic, but instead of r-liaison
("Cuber and America") it used a glottal stop in hiatus
positions before vowel-initial words.

Cross-dialectally then, the pattern seems to be:

Am South: empty syllable onset > [?] following a vowel.
England: word final schwa spreads to following empty onset
(/r/ in onset = /@/ in nucleus)

In England, r-liaison following _a_ and _the_ would be an
infantilism, a stage at which the allomorphy of the clitic
articles has not yet been learnt, and the regular liaison
rule is used instead.

The same could be said of Am South regarding _a_ and _the_,
but David P's explanation, viz. that /?/ is a consonant
phoneme restricted to word-initial position and that there
are no words with empty onsets, is equally persuasive.

--And.