Intrusive r as Articulatorily Natural Resolution for Vowel Hiatus Resolution : Based on the Less-covered Phenomena in Rhoticity

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate that intrusive r in English should rather be analyzed from gestural-based articulatory phonological approach as one of the resolutions for vowel hiatus, synchronic in nature; previous accounts have claimed that r-deletion always precedes r-intrusion, but the present work disproves the argument by the evidence from some varieties of English which have been little studied in terms of rhoticity, including such well-known dialects as the American Southern accent. This paper is in line with the Gicks (1999) gestural viewpoint on r-epenthesis with some modification and thus proposes that intrusive r would be an articulatory natural byproduct constrained mainly by the phonetic quality of /ɹ/, applicable to where vowel hiatus occurs.