[Ads-l] intrusive R again

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Dec 27 00:47:26 UTC 2015


> On Dec 26, 2015, at 5:42 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 9:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> In the dark it's just you [r]an' I.
> 
> Typical of BE. Tend to your business and leave my r-affairs alone, because
> I got tears all in my r-eyes. You can even hear "I r-am" as well as "I
> ?am." There's a no-hiatus rule. Cf, Popeye's "I yam what I yam an' that's
> all that I yam."
> 
> Besides, isn't this a linking R?

Well, I'm not sure.  Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R) limits the former to cases in which "words historically ending in /r/ (as evidenced by an ⟨r⟩ in the spelling) may be pronounced with [r] when they are closely followed by another morpheme beginning with a vowel sound", which is not the case here, and defines the latter as "an r-insertion rule that affects any word that ends in the non-high vowels /ə/, /ɪə/, /ɑː/, or /ɔː/; when such a word is closely followed by another word beginning in a vowel sound, an [r] is inserted between them, even when no final /r/ was historically present", which almost fits this case but not quite, since the environment "you _ and I" involves a non-non-high vowel, unlike the examples given in the wiki-piece, e.g.
"Other recognizable examples are the Beatles singing: "I saw-r-a film today, oh boy" in the song "A Day in the Life", from their 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album".

But if it's not intrusive and not linking, I'm not sure what it is (other than epenthetic).  

LH

> Intrusive R is the one in, e.g. "go[r]ne,"
> overcorrected from "g[OU]n" for "gone."
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
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