Linking /r/ in the General British pronunciation of English

Abstract

Linking /r/ concerns words having as final phoneme in isolate pronunciation either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or one of the five phonemes involving a (final) central vowel /ə, ɜ, ɪə, eə, ʊə/. When any of these is followed closely by a word beginning with one of the English vowel sounds an /r/ may be heard. The Gimson 1970 treatment of this topic contains detailed comments on the limitation of the operation of this pattern in situations where many or most speakers are inhibited from applying the rule to link owing to the influence of popular conceptions of incorrectitude in regard to the uttering of /r/ where no r is represented in the traditional orthography. However, it contains no explicit reference to the dependence of the r-link on either the segmental or the prosodic environments which the words involved in the r-link provide. On the other hand, Ward 1939 and various works of Jones (1918, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c) described at some length ‘special circumstances in which a final r has no consonantal value even when the following word begins with a vowel’ (Jones 1956b : § 757). Gimson 1970 makes no reference to such cases nor to Jones's mention of them. The enquirer must therefore wonder whether there is no reference to such exceptional cases because they are no longer current or merely from pressures of space or possibly from uncertainty. Gimson's revision of the Jones 1956a text of Jones's Explanations in Jones-Gimson 1967, which makes several minor amendments, leaves the fairly lengthy treatment of linking /r/ unaltered.