Alternative analyses
The alternative to [r]-insertion is, logically, some form of deletion. Although the analyses I consider here do not typically interpret this deletion as the direct loss of a segment, they are unified in considering the underlying forms of soar, spar and letter, as well as saw, spa and comma, as having final /r/, in whatever shape their model assumes it to take. I will briefly outline four such analyses below, from declarative phonology (Scobbie 1992), natural phonology (Donegan 1993), Government Phonology (Harris 1994) and a constraint-based lexicalist model (McCarthy 1991). There is an account of English /r/ within Optimality Theory (McCarthy 1993), which I do not include here because it overlaps significantly with McCarthy (1991); the latter, however, considers a wider and more interesting set of data; and the novel aspects, involving OT itself, have been criticized elsewhere already (Blevins 1997, Halle and Idsardi 1997, McMahon 1998a, b). Some of the problems which arise in these analyses are common to all.