English /r/: a brief outline
Accents of English fall into two broad groupings (with some further refinements, as we shall see) with respect to /r/. The actual phonetic realization of /r/ is not constant across all varieties: it is very frequently an alveolar or post-alveolar approximant, but may be a tap, especially initially or intervocalically, in Scottish varieties, or an r-colored schwa in some contexts in General American. There are also pockets of uvular fricatives [ʁ] in Aberdeen, and among older speakers in Northumberland and Durham (Wells 1982, Lass 1987: 94); and the labio-dental approximant [ʋ] is increasingly common in urban areas (Foulkes 1997). Although issues of phonetic realization will be of some concern below, when we turn to the history of /r/, synchronically they are not of central importance; for convenience, I shall therefore generally use [r] notation, not to indicate an alveolar trill, but as shorthand for the various realizations of /r/ found across the accents of English.

In rhotic accents, [r] is pronounced in all possible phonological contexts: word-initially, as in red; intervocalically, as in very; finally, as in letter; and in clusters, as in bread or herd. As a rule of thumb, [r] surfaces wherever there is an in the spelling. Furthermore, in rhotic accents, the set of vowels which can occur before /r/ tends to be identical, or near identical, to that found before other consonants or word-finally: thus, in Scottish Standard English (SSE), the vowels in bee and beer are phonologically the same, giving /bi/ and /bir/. Likewise, SSE speakers have /e/ in hay and /er/ in hair; /a/ in spa and /ar/ in spar;/ɔ/ in law and /ɔr/ in north; /o/ in foe and /or/ in four; and /u/ in queue and /ur/ in cure. Irish, Scottish and Canadian English, as well as General American, some English English accents, and some Caribbean varieties, are rhotic (Wells 1982); but the vowel inventories found before /r/ vary considerably across dialects, and limited mergers, such as the American merry = marry = Mary, do occur. [r]-loss is also still in progress in some areas: Romaine (1978) reports a final zero variant for some working class Edinburgh schoolchildren, most commonly in her male informants, while Sullivan (1992) documents rapidly decreasing rhoticity for younger urban speakers in Exeter.

Non-rhotic accents are found in England, Wales, the Eastern and Southern states of the USA, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Here, [r] does not surface synchronically in all phonological contexts, or in all forms with orthographic . Historical [r] is retained word initially and intervocalically, but has been lost pre-consonantally and pre-pausally, so that [r] appears in red, very and bread, but not in herd or letter. Furthermore, in non-rhotic accents, the inventory of non-low vowels before historical [r] tends to differ from those found elsewhere: beer, hair, four and cure will typically have centring diphthongs, with a schwa offglide, while bee, hay, foe and queue have /i:/, /eɪ/, /oʊ/ and /u:/.

There is also a merger of short /ɪ ε Λ/ before historical /r/, typically as [з:], so that Scots bird, herd, word [bɪrd], [hεrd], [wΛrd] correspond to RP (and other non-rhotic) [bз:d], [hз:d], [wз:d].
 

In many non-rhotic varieties, alternations of [r] and ∅ in simple and derived forms within the same paradigm have arisen because of the retention of historical [r] pre-vocalically but its loss finally and preconso nantally; examples are given in (1).
(1) 

This alternating, etymological [r], in derived intervocalic contexts either word-internally or across word-boundaries, is known as linking [r]. It is present in most non-rhotic accents, but rather infrequent in South Africa and the Southern States of the USA, a fact to which we shall return below. In the Southern USA, /r/ may also optionally be elided intervocalically, giving Carolina [kæ'lanə] and very [vε:ɪ].

A further development in non-rhotic accents other than those of the Southern USA and South Africa involves so-called intrusive [r]. This unetymological [r] appears intervocalically, again word-internally and across word-boundaries, in the same environments as linking [r].

Let us turn now to the question of how these non-rhotic varieties arose, and how they are best accounted for in synchronic terms.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Retrospect and p[r]ospect

Lexical Phonology and English /r/

Modelling the past

Using the past to explain the present

Synchronic arbitrariness and diachronic transparency The problem

Alternative analyses Harris (1994)

Alternative analyses McCarthy (1991)

Alternative analyses Scobbie (1992), Donegan (1993)

Alternative analyses

Rule inversion and [r]-Insertion

Non-rhotic /r/: an insertion analysis An orthoepical interlude

English /r/ Introduction