USAGE: VOT and the status of /r/

Marcos wrote:
> and I'm half-convinced that aspiration is a case of pesky
> furriners trying to gaslight us poor ignorant 'Murkins by making up
> inaudible "distinctions" where none really exists.
Humor understood, but in point of fact voice onset timing is one
of the easiest phonetic facts of a language to measure.  In English,
the VOT of our 'voiceless' stops is about 40-50 milliseconds, which
is similar to the aspirated segments of Hindi IIRC.  I was just
talking to a young phonologist at a party yesterday, though, and
she mentioned that Ladefoged has lots of examples of "voiced"
and "voiceless" contrasts being really far apart, being really
close together, sometimes close at great extremes of the VOT
continuum.

> What's the phonemic status of trailing -r in non-rhotic
> English?  Is it considered an underlying phoneme whose phonetic realization
> is a modification of the preceding vowel (or none at all, in the case of
> schwa), or merely a graphical convention used to indicate in writing which
> of two vowel phonemes should be selected?  (At least in those cases
> where English spelling has some bearing on pronunciation.)
With respect, I must disagree with Tristan.  In most nonrhotic
dialects, the /r/ is really there underlyingly.  One can prove
this by how it will show up as a regular English [r] in liaison
situations, as when the following word begins with a vowel.  The
only catch is that a lot of nonrhotic dialects, such as some in
Britain and New England, have an epenthetic linking-r where
historically no such /r/ existed*.  To my knowledge, nonrhotic
varieties of the American South do not have that linking-r.

*(This fact is not expected if one holds to a theory of phonology
such as Optimality Theory where the quality of epenthetic segments
should fall out from general markedness constraints.)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637