Analogy in the emergence of intrusive-rin English

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach to the phenomenon of intrusive-r in English based on analogy. The main claim of the article is that intrusive-r in non-rhotic dialects of English is the result of the analogical extension of the r~zero alternation shown by words such as far, more and dear. While this idea has been around for a long time, this is the first study that explores this type of analysis in detail. Specifically, I provide an overview of the developments that led to the emergence of intrusive-r and show that they are fully compatible with an analogical approach. This includes the analysis of frequency data taken from an eighteenth-century corpus of English compiled specifically for the purposes of this article and the discussion of a related development, namely intrusive-l. The article also presents a review of the evidence about the variability of intrusive-r, which serves as the basis of an evaluation of previous approaches. Once the notion of analogy is made formally explicit, the analogical approach becomes capable of providing a unified account of the historical development and the variability of intrusive-r. This is demonstrated through a computer simulation of the emergence of the phenomenon based on the eighteenth-century corpus mentioned above. The results of the simulation confirm the predictions of the analogical approach.

/r/-sandhi in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II

“…Within this more functional, usage-based framework, every linguistic item in the lexicon consists of a cloud of phonetic exemplars containing detailed information about the context in which they are used. In this view, /r/-sandhi tokens would not be the result of deletion or insertion rules, but rather the result of how entrenched or lexicalised /r/ is in specific utterances (Hay & Sudbury 2005, Mompean & Mompeán-Guillamón 2009, Hay & Maclagan 2012, Sóskuthy 2013, Pavlík 2016. The more frequent a collocation including a potential /r/-sandhi is, the more likely it is that /r/ will become lexicalised in it and thus be produced.…”

Using spatial patterns of English folk speech to infer the universality class of linguistic copying

“…61 This variable describes the excrescence of a nonetymological /r/ to break up the hiatus between a nonhigh vowel and a following vowel. This is generally understood to be a consequence of the loss of rhoticity and so cannot be dated any later than that sound change [188]; the earliest evidence for the sound change is from Sheridan ([189] cf., [190]), so we cannot assume an age for this variable of greater than 150 years.…”

Fisiología y cognición - el cambio fonético y las teorías acerca del cambio lingüístico más recientes: el cambio [f]- > [h]- en castellano antiguo*

“…A este respecto, tendremos que tomar en cuenta -me-17 Ya se encuentran en p. ej. Lloyd 1987: 46-49 + 222, Tuten 2003: 132-136, Jodl 2015, 2013, Mishima 2016.…”