Do New-Englanders *add* R's?

[Ben Zimmer]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 7:10 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>> Heard on a Boston-area radio local news program:
>>
>> bill-RICK-er
>>
>> A town north of Boston, spelled Billerica, and in my experience (and
>> Wikipedia's) mostly pronounced bill-RICK-uh.
>>
> Isn't this the "idear" and "Cuber" stereotype?  The usual diagnosis, I think,
> is along the lines that the intrusive R comes from a reanalysis/hypercorrection
> influenced by alternation between non-rhotic final R in "the car" /ka:/ vs.
> rhotic linking R in intervocalic contexts like "the car is out of gas" /karIz/.  So
> if you have "Cuba" as /kju:b@/ the way JFK did, then you might get "Cuber
> is just 90 miles off the coast of Florida" as /kju:b at riZ/, and it's a short step
> from that to the reconstruction of "Cuba" and "Billerica" as having an
> underlying -r that would get restored via hypercorrection.

That would be a case of what Ben Sadock has called "intrusive
intrusive /r/". It's not very common in the wild, except in imitations
across the rhotic divide. But see my '08 Language Log post for an
extreme example of hyper-rhoticity, in which a speaker from a
non-rhotic background (Brooklyn's Norman Siegel) hypercorrects like
crazy, with [- at r] in words like "America[r]," "arena[r],"
"Columbia[r]," and "Scalia[r]." I'm sure he says "Cuba[r]" and
"Billerica[r]" too.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=390
link to Siegel interview:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/21910-preeiminent-domain/

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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