Most of us have heard plenty of examples of the so-called Intrusive-R. It is a feature of non-rhotic dialects, including British RP and some New England dialects. It occurs between two vowels that are normally articulated, such as a vowel ending one word followed immediately by a vowel beginning another word, presumably to avoid having to produce a glottal (or other) stop. Or, according to Wikipedia:
The phenomenon of intrusive R is an overgeneralizing reinterpretation[10][11] of linking R into an r-insertion rule that affects any word that ends in the non-high vowels /ə/, /ɪə/, /ɑː/, or /ɔː/;[12] when such a word is closely followed by another word beginning in a vowel sound, an /r/ is inserted between them, even when no final /r/ was historically present.[13] For example, the phrase bacteria in it would be pronounced /bækˈtɪəriərˌɪnɪt/. The epenthetic /r/ can be inserted to prevent hiatus, two consecutive vowel sounds
That passage goes on to note one of the more famous examples, which occurs in the second verse of The Beatles' song "A Day in the Life" as John Lennon sings:
I saw[r]a film today oh boy
The English Army had just won the war
Instances of this phenomenon are legion and, as far as I am aware, uncontroversial. Nevertheless, I have recently noted instances, in the speech of a woman I know, of what can only be called Intrusive-L, because it occurs in the same place and under the same circumstances as Intrusive-R.
For example, the other day she described her children, as she watched them on an amusement park ride, like this:
And I saw[l]'em waving at me as they went by.
Now, she could merely have said "saw them" instead of trying to produce "saw 'em" and the problem would have been obviated, but that's not what happened. There have been other instances as well. Note that she never mixes up /r/ and /l/ in speech, as some people do. She grew up in Southern California, by the way.
My question is this: Is this merely the product of her own idiolect, or is Intrusive-L actually a recognized feature of some dialect(s)?
Note: I went looking for it, but searches for Intrusive-L all seem to assume I really mean Intrusive-R and only return articles about that well-known feature.
A resolution
Based on the evidence in Araucaria's excellent answer I pursued the matter a bit further, contacting the woman and asking her if other family members produced the same intrusive-l sound in everyday speech. She said her mother and grandmother both do. And where is that branch of the family from? Why, Pennsylvania just west of Philadelphia.
Answer
Short answer
Yes, there are varieties of English that use linking and intrusive l in a similar way to how other non-rhotic varieties use linking and intrusive r.
- spa /spa:/
- is /ɪz/
- the spa is /ðə spɑ:r ɪz/ "the spar is" (intrusive r)
- the spa is /ðə spɑ:l ɪz/ "the spal is" (intrusive l)
The examples above show some similarity between linking r and linking l. However, the two are not necessarily quite as similar as they might seem.
Full answer
There has for some time now been interest in the occurrence of intrusive-l a feature of some varieties of English from the north-east of the US. Strangely, although now reasonably well-documented, it is more often seen discussed in the literature because of the light it may throw on the phonological structure of intrusive-r in other varieties, whose distribution it follows in important respects.
Below is a relevant excerpt from an already old paper: Gick, B. (1999) 'A gesture-based account of intrusive consonants in English'. Phonology 16, pp. 29-54:
3 Intrusive l and other l phenomena
3.1 l-vocalisation, linking and intrusion
The intrusive l (see (5)) is a surprisingly widespread phenomenon,
showing patterns similar to those seen in the intrusive r. Its use has been
primarily identified with working class and rural dialects in Pennsylvania,
Delaware and other areas of the northeastern United States, though it has been reported in all other regions of the country except the Northwest. The
few references to the intrusive l to date have all been made in unpublished
works (Gick 1991, 1997, in preparation, Miller 1993).
(5) The intrusive l of south-central Pennsylvania
I draw [dɹɔ:ʁ] --> 2 I’m drawing [dɹɔ:lɪŋ]
the bra [bɹɑ:] --> 2. the bra is [bɹɑ:lɪz]
The intrusive l, like the intrusive r, can be described as the presence of
a non-historical consonant between two vowels, the first of which belongs
to a limited set always including /ɔ/, and very rarely /a/ and /ə/ as well.
Also reminiscent of the intrusive r is the hierarchy of related processes
associated with l-intrusion, which is fixed in the familiar order of
vocalisation, linking and intrusion.
As with r, the historical vocalisation of some pre-consonantal coda /l/'s is evident from orthographic artefacts in such words as half, salve, salmon, talk, calm, folk, etc. In some dialects, however, this process has extended to all coda /l/'s (e.g. drawl [dɹɔ:l]). Ash (1982a) says of certain Philadelphia-area dialects : 'the vocalisation of /l/ results from the loss of contact between the tongue and the palate', a description of l-vocalisation that is well documented for many English dialects (Giles & Moll 1975, Kahn 1976 : 58, 104—105, Ash 1982a, b, Hardcastle & Barry 1989, Brow-man & Goldstein 1995 : 26—27, Narayanan et al. 1997 : 1070).
Again parallelling the patterns of r, in most /l/-vocalising dialects, a brighter allophone of /l/ (one involving a greater tongue tip constriction, among other things) may be heard in intervocalic positions (e.g. drawling [dɹɔ:lɪŋ]). That is, most dialects with vocalisation of/l/ also show linking (see Ash 1982b for an exceptional dialect).
Finally, in some dialects having both vocalisation and linking, as with intrusive r, an [l] can appear intervocalically when a vowel-final word or stem is followed by another vowel. Also similar to the r case, as stated above, the intrusive l may appear following only a very limited set of vowels.
[pp. 35-36]
Gick's 2002 paper The American Intrusive l is downloadable here, if you have an Academia.edu account, or sign up for one. It's free.
No comments:
Post a Comment