A gesture-based account of intrusive consonants in English.
| Number | 1166 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1999 |
| Drawer | 22 |
| Entry Date | 06/19/2000 |
| Authors | Gick, Bryan |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Phonology, 16, 29-54. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1166.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction} A number of recent papers have demonstrated the advantages of using a phonological model incorporating the timing and magnitude of articulatory gestures to account for alternations involving segments such as the English nasals, liquids and glides (e.g. Krakow 1989, Browman & Goldstein 1992, 1995, Sproat and Fujimura 1993, Gick, in press). Some of these works (McMahon et al. 1994, McMahon & Foulkes 1995) have made specific reference to the well-known phenomenon of English INTRUSIVE r, shown in (1). However, previous analyses have not linked the intrusive r explicitly to other similar processes, nor viewed all of these processes as the natural results of more general principles of phonological organisation. Thus, the intrusive r has remained, in the eyes of most linguists, an isolated quirk of English history, or, as one phonologist (McCarthy 1993: 191) has called it, ‘the phonologically unnatural phonomenon of r-epenthesis’. The present paper introduced into the discussion of intrusive r a recently documented related phenomenon known as INTRUSIVE l (Gick 1991, 1997, in preparation, Miller 1993). It is argued that these new facts, in conjunction with current advances in the understanding of articulatory factors in syllable structure, support a view in which the intrusive r and l are synchronically underlying present. Their patterns of appearance and disappearance are argued to be typical of the patterns of timing, augmentation and reduction seen in all segments comprising multiple supralaryngeal gestures (henceforth COMPOSITE SEGMENTS) in similar environments. It will be shown that this approach provides a single account for intrusive r and l as well as a number of other phenomena from a variety of English dialects, using only principles of gestural organisation needed elsewhere in the phonology. Section 2 of this paper covers the descriptive facts of intrusive r, and reviews previous analyses. In section 3, the details of intrusive l are briefly introduced and the relevance of these facts to the interpretation of the intrusive r discussed. Section 4 relates glide formation to the r and l phenomena, and finally, section 5 presents a unified analysis of intrusive consonants and related phenomena based on general properties of gestures in English phonology. |
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