Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T09:42:14.411Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Linking /r/ in the General British pronunciation of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

J. Windsor Lewis
J. Windsor Lewis
Affiliation:
(University of Leeds)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Linking /r/ concerns words having as final phoneme in isolate pronunciation either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or one of the five phonemes involving a (final) central vowel /ə, ɜ, ɪə, eə, ʊə/. When any of these is followed closely by a word beginning with one of the English vowel sounds an /r/ may be heard. The Gimson 1970 treatment of this topic contains detailed comments on the limitation of the operation of this pattern in situations where many or most speakers are inhibited from applying the rule to link owing to the influence of popular conceptions of incorrectitude in regard to the uttering of /r/ where no r is represented in the traditional orthography. However, it contains no explicit reference to the dependence of the r-link on either the segmental or the prosodic environments which the words involved in the r-link provide. On the other hand, Ward 1939 and various works of Jones (1918, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c) described at some length ‘special circumstances in which a final r has no consonantal value even when the following word begins with a vowel’ (Jones 1956b : § 757). Gimson 1970 makes no reference to such cases nor to Jones's mention of them. The enquirer must therefore wonder whether there is no reference to such exceptional cases because they are no longer current or merely from pressures of space or possibly from uncertainty. Gimson's revision of the Jones 1956a text of Jones's Explanations in Jones-Gimson 1967, which makes several minor amendments, leaves the fairly lengthy treatment of linking /r/ unaltered.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , June 1975 , pp. 37 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Gimson, A. C. (1970). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
James, A. Lloyd (1932). The Broadcast Word. London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel (1914). The Pronunciation of English. London: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel (1956a). An English Pronouncing Dictionary. London: Dent.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel (1956b). An Outline of English Phonetics. Cambridge, U.K.: Heffer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Daniel (1956C). The Pronunciation of English. London: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Jones, D., and Gimson, A. C. (1967). An English Pronouncing Dictionary. London: Dent.Google Scholar
Lewis, J. Windsor (1969). A Guide to English Pronunciation. Oslo: Scandinavian Universities Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, J. Windsor (1972). A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary. London: O.U.P.Google Scholar
O'Connor, J. D. (1948). New Phonetic Readings. Berne: A. Francke.Google Scholar
O'Connor, J. D. (1967). Better English Pronunciation. London : C.U.P.Google Scholar
O'connor, J. D. (1971). Advanced Phonetic Reader. London: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Pring, J. T., and Germer, R. (1962). A New English Phonetic Reader. Dortmund: Lambert Lensing.Google Scholar
Turner, J. Clifford (1956). Voice and Speech in the Theatre. London: Pitman.Google Scholar
Ward, I. C. (1939). The Phonetics of English. Cambridge, U.K.: Heffer.Google Scholar