iron: /@r/ vs syllabic /r/

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 08:01 PM 8/11/00 +0100, Aaron Drews wrote:
And yes, it is [kjub at r Iz].

I too hear the liaison /r/ in British English.  But I have a colleague who
adds a final schwar to many words, as in [manIk at r] for Monica and even
[j at r] for 'yeah'.  He's from Manchester but spent many years first in the
U.S. and then in Japan and has been with us one year now.  Where does this
come from?  Is it a kind of hypercorrection toward presumed American
English?  Wolfram and Schilling-Estes suggest that this happens "in some
varieties ... at the end of sentences, as in 'I got the idear' " (1998, p.
39).  Has anyone else heard this? in both Brit and Am Eng?

And a related case of liaison:  Al Gore sounds so painfully wooden, I
think, because he's constantly trying to suppress his East Tennessee
English.  But the other day he said something like "we'll need an extry
amount of (whatever)," adding a neat palatalized liaison between the two
vowels.  A breath of fresh air!

And finally:  I heard that there was to be a segment on NPR last Sunday on
the two candidates' dialects.  Did anyone hear it?  Is it available
somewhere?  Was it worth hearing??

_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm