Re: USAGE: VOT and the status of /r/

On 29 Jan 2005, at 6.22 pm, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Tristan wrote:
>> Tom Weir:
>
> NB:  My family name is <Wier>. :)
>
>>> Marcos wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> I wasn't talking about varieties of the American South, but only
>> my English.
>
> Okay, but the question was asking about nonrhotic dialects in
> general, of which Australian dialects are only a part.
Yeah, I realise that, and I didn't mean to say that I was trying to
talk of *all* of them, only of mine.

>  Indeed,
> the number of speakers of nonrhotic English dialects in the
> United States, though a small minority there, exceeds the
> entire population of Australia,
Really? I thought non-rhotic American was practically dead?

> and then that's not including
> the 50 or so million people in the UK who speak nonrhotic
> dialects.
Well, I was of the understanding they mostly did the same as me except
amongst more conservative speakers. At least the concept of 'intrusive
r' is a British one, implying that they must have at least a sizeable
minority who have puts the unwritten R in to 'law and order'.

>> So I really don't see why you'd say it was underlyingly there
>> in the only English I'm capable of commenting on :)
>
> You might be right about your own dialect, although I'm pretty
> sure I've heard Australians who don't always have intrusive
> linking-r for hiatus between words.
I've heard it once or twice, but nothing significant was meant by it
I'm sure; I've heard an absence of derived/spelt r in such places too.
Colloquially at least. (In the formal speech of my peers it seems to be
fashionable to use a glottal stop rather than r to avoid this hiatus
between words, but 'drawing' or 'withdrawal' still have extra -r- in
them.) I'll admit some newsreporters etc. might use as an artificial
dialect designed to appease some of their older, more conservative and
prescriptivist audience, but I'm not aware of that (I mostly read the
news).

>
>>> *(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.)
>>
>> I'm not sure what any of that means :)
>
> In OT, the quality of epenthetic segments is supposed to be a
> result of constraint interaction, and is not written directly
> into the grammar. So, e.g. if one encounters an instance of
> hiatus, and the other principles of the grammar say it's better
> to epenthesize a consonant than to delete one of the vowels,
> the choice between [j], [t], [w], [h], etc. is supposed to be
> decided by how highly that language ranks the constraint
> favoring stops versus glides, or labials versus coronals,
> etc.  But since the set of constraints is not symmetric
> (i.e., there are some constraints militating against retroflexes,
> but not necessarily any militating against coronals), one
> does not expect to see a marked segment like [r] ever arising
> through constraint interaction.
So there's general rules about what sounds can be used in hiatus (in OT
at least)? (BTW: I'm not sure quite how relevant your comment on
retroflexes is, and this is all still going above my head, but I
thought that in general in non-rhotic Englishes /r/ was an alveolar
approximate, not a retroflex one. I would think an alveolar approximate
would be a good choice for hiatus-avoidance in non-high vowels, but I
could be biased by my own speech. I can't comment on the truth of this
other than what I've read though.)

>  And yet it's there, and apparently
> in your dialect thorough-goingly so.
Yes, to the point that some people aren't even aware they're doing it,
till it's brought to their attention. But perhaps it's replaced by [?]
in some (social, not linguistic) cases to make OT happier?

--
Tristan.

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