/r/-liaison in English: An empirical study

Abstract This article presents the results of an empirical study on the phenomenon of /r/-liaison (i.e., linking /r/ and intrusive /r/) in non-rhotic English from the perspective of usage-based Cognitive Linguistics. The study looks into sociolinguistic, phonetic and usage-based factors that condition variability in /r/-liaison through the analysis of news archives from the BBC World Service website (years 2004 and 2005). The paper argues that a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of /r/-liaison requires an analysis of the different aspects that condition its use and the use of empirical methods to study it.


Introduction
English accents are traditionally divided into two groups, the rhotic and the nonrhotic, according to the distribution of the phoneme /r/. Rhotic accents are characterised by the pronunciation of the letter <r> as an r-sound in all positions. In contrast, nonrhotic accents pronounce an r-sound only when the letter <r> is followed by a vowel sound, a phenomenon known as linking /r/. Accordingly, /r/ is not found (in non-rhotic English) in words such as store /stɔ:/ (not followed by a vowel), stores /stɔ:z/, or stork /stɔ:k/ since <r> is followed by a pause (store) or consonant sound (stores, stork). A 'linking' r-sound is pronounced, however, when the <r> is followed by a vowel sound across word boundaries (e.g. store it /stɔ:r ɪt/) or in word-internal position (e.g. storing /ˈstɔ:rɪŋ/).
A related phenomenon in non-rhotic accents is that of intrusive /r/, i.e. an epenthetic r-sound in intervocalic positions where historically there has never been an /r/ in the pronunciation of the word and present-day spelling does not contain the letter <r> (e.g. the idea [r] of /ðə aɪˈdɪər ɒv/ or I saw [r] it /aɪ sɔ:r ɪt/). Since intrusive /r/ in non-rhotic accents is not justified by the spelling, this unetymological /r/ has traditionally been regarded as a vulgarism by many speakers; so its use -but not that of linking /r/-is typically stigmatised (Crystal 1984: 36;Jones, 1956: 114;Knowles, 1987: 134;Wells, 1982: 224). However, despite their different degree of prestige as well as historical linguistic and orthographic differences, linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ are often considered to be essentially the same phenomenon (e.g. Wells & Colson, 1971: 95): both are found word-internally or across word boundaries, and only after certain nonhigh vowels, namely /ɑ:/, /ɔ:/ or the final central vowels /ə, ɜ:, ɪə, eə, ʊə/ (Collins & Mees, 2003: 105;Lewis, 1975: 37;Wells, 1982: 226;Wells & Colson, 1971: 94). In addition, both phenomena (often jointly referred to as /r/-liaison or /r/-sandhi) seem to have the same linguistic function, namely the avoidance of hiatus or lack of a consonant separating two vowels in separate syllables (Knowles, 1987: 132). 1 Different descriptive studies have looked at /r/-liaison in many varieties of nonrhotic English (e.g. Bauer, 1984;Foulkes, 1997;Hay & Sudbury, 2005;Tollfree, 1999;Watt & Milroy, 1999;etc.). These studies have made it clear that although /r/-liaison is very common in non-rhotic English, its use is by no means universal or categorical in these accents. For instance, according to Brown (1988: 147), neither linking /r/ nor intrusive /r/ are generally found in South-East United States or in South-Africa. In addition, in some accents that exhibit linking /r/ the use of intrusive /r/ seems to be categorical, like Norwich (see e.g. Trudgill, 1974) or Yorkshire (e.g. Broadbent, 1991).

/r/-liaison in RP: An Empirical Study
The existence of variability in the use of /r/-liaison in some non-rhotic accents of English like RP raises the question of what factors condition such variability.
Unfortunately, few empirical studies have so far investigated /r/-liaison usage patterns either in RP or in other non-rhotic accents. Exceptions are, in the case of New Zealand correspondences between spelling and pronunciation (e.g. that a given letter should have a given phonemic value) and how spelling should capture such associations. These views sometimes make speakers believe that silent letters found in the spelling of words should be pronounced. This explains why some speakers insert sounds in words like pa [l]m, of[t]en, fa [l]con, etc. (see e.g. Collins & Mees, 2003;Wells, 1999) or why sounds that are not justified by the spelling but are pronounced are occasionally avoided (e.g. the idea [r]

of).
Speakers' views about language use can be thought of as 'folk theories' around which cognitive psychology has long claimed and shown that concepts are organised (see e.g. Lin & Murphy, 1997;Murphy, 1993;Rips 1989Rips , 1995 and which other cognitive scientists have discussed under various names for different types of knowledge structures like 'frames ' (e.g., Fillmore 1985), 'scripts' (e.g., Schank & Abelson 1977), 'mental models' (e.g., Barsalou 1992), 'idealized cognitive models' (Lakoff, 1987), etc. These folk theories are sets of beliefs which, according to Rips (1995), may be sketchy, naïve, stereotyped, or incorrect. Therefore, folk theories are "any of a host of mental explanations rather than a complete, organized, scientific account" (Murphy & Medin, 1985: 312). Applied to /r/-liaison, speakers' folk theory about the phenomenon is likely to include ideas, if elicited from average linguistically naïve speakers, such as "pronouncing an r-sound in lore and mysticism is fine because there is an 'r' in the spelling", "an r-sound in law and order is not 'correct' because there is no 'r' in the spelling", etc. Given this folk theory of /r/-liaison, it can be expected that, despite being phonetically and linguistically essentially the same phenomenon as explained above, there would be differences in the rate of use of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ in the sense that the former will be more common than the latter.
The sociolinguistic aspect of /r/-liaison relates to usage patterns by specific groups of speakers given factors like age, social class, gender, etc, variables typically studied by traditional sociolinguistic research. Providing an account of the sociolinguistic factors that influence /r/-liaison usage and therefore language-internal variation is not only of interest to traditional sociolinguistics but also to Cognitive Linguistics, where recent discussions advocate that a genuinely cognitive approach should take into consideration cultural and social aspects of language and cognition (see e.g. Croft, 2005;Geeraerts, 2003Geeraerts, , 2005Harder, 1999;Hougaard, 2005;Kristiansen, 2003;Kristiansen & Dirven, forthcoming;Sinha, 1999). These discussions claim that, as long as Cognitive Linguistics takes the claim that it is a usage-based approach to language, it should take into account the rich and complex patterns of intralingual variation, which are far from descriptive studies carried out at the level of 'a language' that provide a picture of a supposedly homogeneous and idealized speech community.
As a case in point, it has been suggested that there might be gender differences in the sense that females would tend to use less intrusive /r/'s than males given that intrusive /r/ is contrary to the overtly prestigious usage in the community and that females tend to use prestigious variants (Bauer, 1984: 76;Coates, 1993: 183;Dubois & Horvath, 1999: 299;Labov, 1990: 213). It has also been pointed out that the use of /r/liaison is a notable field of cross-speaker variation (Lewis, 1975: 39). All factors being equal, some speakers might always use /r/-liaison, use it variably, or never use it at all.
In this respect, most accounts of /r/-liaison in RP claim that the phenomenon is variable (e.g. Bauer, 1984;Lewis, 1975), although it has been occasionally suggested that some people (at least in the South of England) do not use linking /r/ at all (Jones, 1956: 113).
Another aspect of /r/-liaison is its linguistic component in the sense of distributional, structural or frequential factors that might play a role in /r/-liaison usage.
For instance, variability in the use of /r/-liaison could be due to the position of the potential intrusive /r/ context in the word. In this respect, intrusive /r/ could be less frequent in word-internal cases where a morpheme is preceded by a prefix (e.g. hyper-, super-, etc.) 2 or followed by a suffix (e.g. -ing, -al, etc.) than across word boundaries (Gimson, 1980: 304;Lewis, 1975: 40-41). This might again be due to the few cases of hiatus in word-internal position involving non-high vowels followed by another vowel, which might make speakers more aware of intrusive /r/ -and thus try to avoid it-. As far as linking /r/ is concerned, there appears to be no variability in prefixed or affixed words (García-Lecumberri & Maidment, 2000: 34;Wells, 1982Wells, : 1982Wells & Colson, 1971: 94). In contrast, linking /r/ could be used variably in compounds, since the different elements in the latter are not so strongly 'glued' together as in other polymorphemic words, and certain word boundary phenomena like /r/-liaison might operate or not. Not surprisingly, Jones (1960: 196) comments that /r/ is "...generally inserted in compound words" (emphasis added), which suggests that linking /r/ in compounds is not a categorical phenomenon. Another linguistic factor that could influence variability in the use of /r/-liaison is lexicalisation -or entrenchment (Langacker, 1987: 59)-of the /r/ in certain groups of words and expressions/collocations. For instance, intrusive /r/ might be lexicalised in expressions such as the idea of. In this respect, Jones (1956: 113) claims that there are people who restrict the use of linking /r/ to very common expressions like for instance or after all.
This may also apply to collocations -sequences of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance-.
The last aspect of /r/-liaison is its phonetic component, i.e. the fact that use of /r/liaison could be conditioned by articulatory and/or acoustic aspects. Providing an account of such factors is essential in any phonological study since it is at present widely acknowledged in phonological work that phonetics not only can but that it should provide explanations of the processes and phenomena that phonology deal with (see e.g. Blumstein, 1991;Keating, 1991;Kohler, 1995;Ohala, 1987Ohala, , 1990Pierrehumbert, 2000, for related ideas). This is similar to ideas about experientialism and embodiment discussed for categories in the Cognitive Linguistics literature (see e.g. Lakoff, 1987;Rohrer, 2005) in which a central aspect is how the bodily apparatus shapes our linguistic categorisation and conceptualisation. In the same way, phonological categories and processes are also shaped by articulatory, acoustic and auditory factors (as well as cognitive, sociolinguistic and linguistic ones). As a case in point, it has been claimed that the type of vowel phoneme at the end of the syllable that would make the link may have an influence on the use of intrusive /r/. More specifically, it has been claimed that intrusive /r/ could be more frequent after lexical items ending in /ɑ:/ or /ɔ:/ than after those ending in a central vowel (Broadbent, 1991: 301;Hay & Warren, 2002;Hay & Sudbury, 2005: 810) given that there are important acoustic similarities between rhotic approximants and back vowels like the presence of a low L2 (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996;Ladefoged, 2001;Stevens, 1998: 288, 545;Peterson & Barney, 1952).
Another phonetic factor affecting variability in the use of /r/-liaison could be the presence of /r/ at the beginning of the syllable that would make the link, as in a [r]oar of laughter or Victo[r]ia and Albert. In these cases, according to Jones (1956: 112-113), /r/ is not as a rule inserted. Windsor Lewis claims that the link is generally made (Lewis, 1975: 38); but Brown (1988: 145) says that /r/-liaison seems to occur "less readily". Irrespective of the frequency of /r/-liaison in these cases, the reason for avoiding the former when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/ could be motivated by the lack of preference for similar or identical sounds in the same environment. In the history of a language, this often leads to dissimilation or the process by means of which similar consonant sounds in a word become different over time. In fact, avoidance of two adjacent r-sounds is often mentioned as a typical case of dissimilation (e.g. Ashby & Maidment, 2005: 142)  Given the few empirical studies available on /r/-liaison usage, the aim of the present paper is to provide more empirical evidence to gain a better understanding of /r/liaison in non-rhotic English, more specifically in the accentual variety known as RP.
More specifically, the research questions investigated in this paper are: 1) are there significant differences in the use of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/?
2) is avoidance of /r/-liaison more common in female speakers than male speakers?
3) are there speakers who never produce linking /r/? 4) is intrusive /r/ more common after a central vowel than after back vowels? 5) how frequent is intrusive /r/ at word-internal morpheme boundaries in polymorphemic words (excluding compounds)? 6) does /r/-liaison occur invariably in compounds? 7) is /r/-liaison generally avoided when the syllable likely to make the link begins with /r/? 8) how frequent is /r/-liaison in common expressions/collocations? Based on previous discussions in the relevant literature, the hypotheses entertained in this paper are that: a) there will be significant differences in the rate of use of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/; b) female speakers will avoid /r/-liaison more often than male speakers; c) there will be no speakers who never use linking /r/; d) intrusive /r/ will be more common after back vowels (e.g. /ɑ:/ and /ɔ:/) than after central vowels; e) intrusive /r/ will be a very infrequent phenomenon at word-internal morpheme boundaries in polymorphemic words; f) /r/-liaison will be found variably in compounds; g) /r/-liaison will be generally avoided when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/; h) /r/-liaison will be very frequent in common expressions/collocations.

Method
Data 307 texts from the news archives of the BBC World Service website (see URL 1) were used in order to gain the evidence necessary to answer the research questions formulated above. This resource was chosen because most newsreaders are RP speakers so the archives provide a large amount of data on this accent.
Among the characteristics of the texts analysed for this study are that they are free of charge and are readily available on the BBC World Service website both as RealPlayer audio files (see URL 2) and as written passages. Most audio files also have relatively good (even studio-like) sound quality. The archives contain texts arranged by year starting from 2001 to the present moment. However, for this study, only the news archives corresponding to the years 2004 and 2005 were investigated. Another feature of the corpus is that, almost without exception, individual texts are read by a single newsreader, although texts occasionally include brief excerpts spoken by interviewees (RP speakers or not) or sound (music, noises, etc.). Finally, most texts are preceded by a written introduction with no spoken counterpart and they are followed by specific words/expressions that the text features in bold (since it is a learning resource) with an explanation of their meaning and an additional audio file (typically recorded by a speaker other than the newsreader). The written introduction, the featured words and the additional audio file were not analysed in this study.
Appendix A at the end of this paper contains the title of the different newscasts, date of broadcast, name of the newsreader and gender (M = male; F = female) and a reference number arbitrarily assigned to each of the texts for later analysis. The appendix also includes an indication of the relevance of the text for the current study (A = analysed; NA = not analysed). The criteria for a given text to be analysed were: a) that the text should be read by an RP speaker; b) that the name of the newsreader, even in the case of RP speakers, should be identified; c) that the text should be available as an audio file at the time the study was conducted (since failed links are occasionally found due to technical problems of the website); d) that the text should be read by a professional newsreader (on a few occasions the texts are live recordings by the protagonists of news, interviewees, etc.).
These requirements ruled out 38 texts that were not read by an RP speaker,three texts (no. 195,278 & 294)  to speech other than the newsreaders' (e.g. interviewees' appearances) as well as comparing the written and spoken versions of the same text for differences between both which might affect word counts and analyses. This comparison involved adding to or deleting words from the written version if discrepancies were found between the written and spoken versions, contracting words in the written version -e.g. there is → there'sif a contracted form was found in the spoken version, etc. Time was also measured, taking away from the measured duration of each text those fragments by speakers other than the newsreaders or fragments of music/noise over 3 seconds long.
According to the authors' analysis, the whole corpus of identified RP speech lasts for around 4 hours, 20 minutes and 57 seconds.

Speakers
The texts from the 2004-2005 archives were produced by at least 152 BBC newsreaders, a relatively homogeneous group as far as social class is concerned (if the latter is defined with reference to the speakers' professional activity -i.e. broadcasting-).
The newsreaders were identified as male or female by the quality of their voice and by their name, provided next to the written version of the text. In addition, each newsreader was identified as an RP/non-RP speaker based on a number of features like presence or absence of rhoticity and typical segmental inventories described for the accent. As far as the RP speakers are concerned, most of them can be defined as Mainstream RP (Wells, 1982) or General (Gimson, 1980) speakers; there are presumably cases of Adoptive RP (Wells, 1982) and speakers with more conservative pronunciations like Jane Peel or Red Harrison. However, no distinction is made in this paper between subtypes of RP in relation to the occurrence of /r/-liaison in this accent.
Regarding the non-RP speakers, some of them were rhotic. In addition, a few non-rhotic speakers were excluded from the study for having an accent sharing many features with RP (i.e. near-RP) but having conspicuously regional features like the use of labiodental approximants for /r/ (e.g. Louisa Lim), typical of South-eastern England (see e.g.

Procedure
Only the texts read by identified RP speakers and available at the time this study was conducted were analysed (i.e. 263). For each text, its written version was copied and pasted into a Word document where the potential /r/-liaison contexts were identified. The identification process involved reading the texts for potential environments and marking them (intrusive /r/ -in bold-, linking /r/ -underlined-).
Regarding the issue of what a potential context can be, the following criteria were followed. First, as Wells remarks (1982: 224; 1994: 198), the weakening to schwa of the final RP diphthong in words like window, pillow, etc. (i.e. /əʊ/), typical of some regional accents, is resisted by RP, where an unstressed diphthong is still the norm.
Therefore, examples like "…neighbouring Kosovo and Macedonia…" (text no. 170) were not considered as examples of potential intrusive /r/.
Second, words ending in a non-high vowel phoneme with orthographic <r> (for linking /r/) or without orthographic <r> (for intrusive /r/) and followed by the personal pronouns he and him, the possessive adjectives/pronouns his and her, the reflexive pronouns himself and herself and three forms of the verb to have (i.e. have, has, and had) were considered as potential contexts only if loss of /h/ had previously occurred.
The loss of /h/ in these cases produces a context of adjoining vowels (e.g. "…but soft where (h)is father was…", text no. 102) and thus the necessary conditions for potential /r/-liaison (Knowles, 1987: 133-134).
Third, it has often been claimed that linking /r/ is categorical in word-internal position, even if it is in-between two morphemes. For example, García-Lecumberri and Maidment (2000: 34) claim that "if the orthographic r is in the middle of a word followed by a vowel, /r/ must be pronounced: bearing /ˈbeərɪŋ/ NEVER /ˈbeəɪŋ/" (capitals and italics in the original). Given this, word-internal cases of linking /r/ in polymorphemic words made of prefix + stem (e.g. hyper-inflation, text no. 131) or stem + suffix (e.g. ignoring, text no. 54) should not be considered as 'potential' contexts of linking /r/ in this study. However, as stated in the Introduction, it has sometimes been claimed that word-internal linking /r/ might not be found in compounds. For this reason, compounds were considered as potential cases of linking /r/ in this study but polymorphemic words made up of stem + suffix or prefix + stem or any other monomorphemic words containing orthographic r in word-internal position (e.g. sorry) were not.
With these considerations in mind, searches for typical orthographic contexts, and specific lexical items mentioned in the literature -or found through the sound search tool of EPD- (Roach et al. 2003) were performed using the Search tools available in Microsoft Word. These searches were carried out to minimise the possibility of overlooking or missing any potential contexts. In the case of linking /r/, the combinations <r> and <re> were checked with a space after them, which leads to word boundaries, or with a punctuation mark after <r> or <re> (e.g. r, r. r: r; r-r -r? r! r" r) r] r* r' r> r#).
Regarding intrusive /r/, both word-internal and word-boundary contexts were considered. In the case of word-internal positions, combinations of the letter <a> plus another vowel letter were searched for (e.g. <ai>, as in concertinaing) as well as the digraph <aw> followed by another vowel letter (e.g. <awa>, as in withdrawal; <awi>, as in drawing; <awe>, as in awe-inspiring) or <y> (e.g. strawy). Across wordboundaries, the combinations <a> and <aw> were checked with a space after them or the same letters followed by a punctuation mark (i.e. a, a. a: a; a-a -a? a! a" a) a] a* a' a> a#). In addition, words ending in orthographic <ah>, <eh>, and <agh> were searched for since many words of non-Saxon origin (especially Arabic, Hebrew and Celtic) are often spelled in this way (e.g. Abdullah, Jehovah, Methuselah, Rafah, Omagh, Nineveh, etc.) as well as a few words like yeah. Other marginal spellings were also inspected like <oi>, as in moi, <ois> as in bourgeois, <ieu> as in milieu, <as> as in Degas or <urgh> as in Oxburgh ( /ˈɒksbrə/, see e.g. text no. 238).
For both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/, the search options <r->, <re->, <aw-> or <awe-> were sufficient to detect hyphenated compounds (e.g. near-obsession, text. no. 87). Open form compounds (e.g. Far East, text no. 99) or closed form compounds (e.g. firearm, text no. 30) were identified manually. In the case of orthographic <r> or <re> followed by he, him, his, her, himself, herself, have, has or had, the corresponding texts were listened to in order to decide whether the /h/ had been dropped. If so, the expression was considered as a potential context of /r/-liaison. This inspection revealed, as Bauer has suggested (1984: 77), that it is probably the exception rather than the ruleat least in broadcast speech-to delete /h/ in these cases.
Next, texts were analysed auditorily for the occurrence/non-occurrence of intrusive /r/ in the potential contexts identified. Decisions were generally quickly reached as to the appearance or not of an instance of /r/-liaison. However, in a few cases, auditory analysis was considered insufficient and spectrographic analysis of the relevant sound files was necessary. Two types of cases needed particular attention. The first was uncertainty about the presence of /r/. In this respect, it has long been noted that /r/ is characterised by a low F3 which, although it is not true for all rhotics in the languages of the world (see e.g. Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996: 244;Lindau, 1985), is a well-justified specification at least for American and British English post-alveolar and retroflex approximants (ibid.). Thus visual inspection of the corresponding spectrogram(s) and presence/absence of a prominent low F3 was considered the criterion for determining the presence/absence of an r-sound (see e.g. Figure 1). The second case involved analysis of sequences of /r/+/ǝ/+potential /r/-liaison, for which some authors (e.g. Brown, 1988: 145;Lewis, 1977: 30-31) claim that speakers often omit the schwa and prolong the /r/, making it syllabic. Presence of a long [ɹ] was considered as an instance of /r/-liaison, previous to the elision of schwa. In order to carry out the spectrographic analysis, sound was captured using Total Recorder (see URL 3), a commercial sound recording program that records PC audio from almost any source, including streamed audio from programs like RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. Once saved as an audio file, the Speech Filing System (SFS), a free program for speech research developed at UCL (see URL 4) was used to carry out spectrographic inspection of the sound files.
Appendix C shows, for female and male speakers separately, the potential intrusive /r/ contexts associated to a given text reference number. A specification of the phoneme involved in the potential liaison as well as an indication of whether an intrusive /r/ is actually inserted in each context is also provided. Appendix D shows, also for both groups, the potential linking /r/ contexts as well as the contexts associated to their text reference number and an indication of whether a linking /r/ was inserted or not.

Results and Discussion
The results obtained from the analysis of the corpus investigated provide some answers to the research questions formulated in this paper in relation to /r/-liaison usage in a non-rhotic accent of English like RP. The analysis shows, in general terms, that absence of linking /r/ is very frequent since the percentage of linking /r/ occurrences in the corpus (females and males combined) is less than two thirds of all potential cases (i.e. 59%). This relatively low percentage of linking /r/ could be due to the careful, speech-conscious style of the news. In fact, it has been claimed that "use of linking/intrusive /r/ is a feature of fluent colloquial style, and is not so common in careful declarative style" (Brown, 1988: 145). The low percentage could also be partly due to the tendency among some speakers, to eliminate intrusive /r/ from their speech.
Having been told it is slovenly or vulgar (Wells & Colson, 1971: 95), many speakers eliminate intrusive /r/ only "at the expense of eliminating linking /r/'s too" (ibid.). In this respect, studies with scripted speech read by newscasters have shown similar tendencies in other languages, with speech being closer to canonical forms than casual speech (see e.g. Torstensson, 2004). The results also show that intrusive /r/ is not a very frequent phenomenon in broadcast RP, and perhaps -like linking /r/ less frequent than in colloquial, unscripted speech like (Brown, 1988: 145). In a corpus of almost 50.000 words and out of 165 potential cases (males and females combined), only 52 cases were found, which represents less than a third (31.5%) of all potential cases. This finding is similar to percentages of intrusive /r/ occurrence found in other non-rhotic accents like Tyneside, with a rate of around 20% (e.g. Watt & Milroy, 1999) or New Zealand English, with a rate of around 30% (Hay & Warren, 2002).
An important finding in this study in relation to the percentages of usage of both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ is that the differences in rate are not random. More specifically, a chi-square test shows that there are statistically significant differences between the use of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ (X2(1)=37.812, p<0.05), although a Cramer's V test, which measures the strength of association or dependency between two (nominal) categorical variables in a contingency table, shows that the association is not very strong (0.181, p<0.05). Figure 2 shows the differences between linking and intrusive /r/ (males and females combined). This shows, in some way, that the phenomenon is stigmatised since, if driven by analogy, there should not be great differences in percentage of use between intrusive /r/ and linking /r/. The hypothesis entertained then for the first research question investigated in this study is therefore confirmed. The second research question investigated in this paper refers to whether avoidance of /r/-liaison is more common in female speakers than in male speakers. The results obtained are summarised in Table 2. Figure 3 also shows the percentages of /r/liaison usage by both male and female speakers. Regarding linking /r/, out of 216 potential cases in the females' data, 120 linking /r/'s were produced. In the males' data, out of 768 potential cases, 450 linking /r/'s were found. These figures represent, respectively, 55.5% and 59% of all potential cases in each group. This shows that male newsreaders used linking /r/ more often than women so the hypothesis entertained is confirmed as far as linking /r/ is concerned. The analysis of the data also reveals that out of 29 potential cases of intrusive /r/, females produced only 7 whereas men produced 45 out of 136 potential cases. The percentage of intrusive /r/'s in each group is, respectively, 24% and 33%, which again confirms the hypothesis that men produce more intrusive /r/'s than women.
Chi-square tests show, however, that the differences between men and women are not statistically significant for either linking /r/ (X2(1)=0.876, p= 0.349>0.05) or intrusive /r/ (X2(1)=0.532, p= 0.466>0.05). As far as intrusive /r/ is concerned, two explanations seem to be readily at hand for the observed patterns. On the one hand, taking for granted that the phenomenon is equally stigmatised for both groups, intrusive /r/ could be in principle less frequent in the female population but, perhaps, the male newsreaders analysed are, as a group, more conscious of the stigmatised nature of the phenomenon, conditioned by the formal context of newsreading, and make more efforts to avoid it with the result that the differences between the rates of occurrence of /r/ are not statistically significant.
On the other hand, and also taking for granted that intrusive /r/ is equally stigmatised for both groups, it might be claimed that once females have access to a labour market traditionally monopolised by men, the former tend to imitate men in different ways, including males' speech habits (Coates, 1993: 10). If this applies to /r/liaison, it would mean that women tend to use intrusive /r/ as often as men in imitation of the latter.  The third research question studied asked whether there are RP speakers who never produce linking /r/. This research question was motivated by Jones's claims, at the middle of the twentieth century, that "a great many Southern people" did not use linking /r/ "at all" (Jones, 1956: 113), an assertion less strongly expressed by the same author when he claimed that there appeared to be "an increasing tendency, especially among younger people, not to use linking /r/ at all" -emphasis added- (Jones, 1960: 197). The hypothesis entertained in this study is that there would not be speakers, at present, who never use linking /r/ since it is assumed that linking /r/ is too widespread a phenomenon for it to be avoided on every single occasion by a given speaker in RP.
It must be born in mind that, since the data analysed were not elicited by the author but are already available from the BBC website, the number of potential linking /r/ contexts per person is variable, with speakers for whom there is no context at all or for whom there are many contexts. The situation is similar in the case of intrusive /r/.
Most importantly, since a single potential context cannot provide information as to within-speaker variability in the production of /r/-liaison, only data from speakers for whom more than one potential context could be identified were analysed. In the analysis of the results, there were only two speakers for whom there was no potential instance of linking /r/. For the remaining 128 speakers considered, Table 3 below offers the number of newsreaders (females/males) who produced at least one linking /r/ in the potential cases found in their newscasts and those who did not produce any linking /r/ at all. The data show that there are no speakers in the corpus who never produce linking /r/ if six or more potential cases are found in their newscasts. In addition, out of the 21 speakers who had five cases, there was only one (Paul Keller, text no. 27) who did not produce any linking /r/ at all. Further inspection of the archive (previous years and current news) should be carried out to find out whether this particular speaker actually does not produce any linking /r/ in his broadcast speech. For the remaining number of speakers for whom four or fewer cases of linking /r/ were identified, most speakers (42) pronounced at least one linking /r/ and for those who did not (i.e. 12), the potential cases are too few to draw any solid conclusion given that, with a larger number of potential cases, speakers with five or fewer number of potential cases in the corpus could be found to produce at least one linking /r/.
In sum, the data discussed above offer little evidence in support of the claim that there are speakers who never produce any linking /r/ in their speech, which seems to put into question Jones's claim that there are speakers who never produce linking /r/ (at least in RP). If the phonetician's impressions were accurate (as they probably were), his claims may have referred to a particular tendency no longer on the increase and/or widespread even if the speech under analysis comes from scripted broadcast speech, in which a higher percentage of /r/-liaison avoidance than in colloquial, spontaneous speech could be expected.

Females Males Females Males
No. of contexts  Table 3. Number of newsreaders (females/males) who produced or did not produce at least one linking /r/ against the number of potential contexts of linking /r/ in the different texts analysed.
The fourth research question investigated in this paper looked at whether intrusive /r/ is more common after a central vowel than after back vowels. In the data analysed, the phonemic contexts after which an intrusive /r/ could have been inserted are /ə/ preceded by a consonant (C+/ə/), stressed diphthongal /ɪə/, unstressed, disyllabic /i.ə/, disyllabic /i:.ə/ (stressed on /i:/), and /ɔ:/ (see Table 4 below). These contexts are within what can be expected a priori, since intrusive /r/ has often been claimed to be extremely rare after (final) central vowels other than schwa, particularly /eə/, /ʊə/, or /ɜ:/ simply because native words containing those vowels at morpheme boundaries and not followed by historical /r/ are almost non-existent (Brown, 1988: 150;Collins & Mees, 2003: 105;Wells & Colson, 1971: 95 Table 4. Potential cases of intrusive /r/, actual occurrences and percentages by previous vowel context: data from females (F), males (M) and both groups combined (C). Table 4 shows that the percentage of intrusive /r/ after a central vowel, combining the individual results of the different final phonemic contexts identified in the corpus (i.e. C+/ə/, /ɪə/, /i.ə/, /ˈi:.ə/ and /eə/), is 27%, with little difference between female newsreaders (23%) and male ones (28%). These data are similar to the ones that consider only C+/ə/, by far the most common central vowel context in the corpus. The percentage of intrusive /r/s after C+/ə/ (females and males combined) is 26%, a figure that is also similar to the percentage of intrusive /r/'s after /i.ə/ (i.e. 28%), the second most common central vowel context after C+/ə/. Most interestingly, the percentage of intrusive /r/'s after /ɔ:/ (72%, males and females combined) is much higher than that of the central vowels combined (see also figure 4), and the difference is statistically significant by a chi-square test (X2(1) = 15. 142, p<0.05) although the association is not very strong by a Cramer's V test (0.305, p<0.05). The results are also in sharp contrast with claims in the literature in the sense that intrusive /r/ would be more common after central vowels given that there are fewer cases of it after back vowels, which might make speakers more aware of intrusive /r/ and therefore these would tend to avoid it more (e.g. Brown, 1988: 150;Collins & Mees, 2003: 105;Crystal, 1984: 42;Gimson, 1980: 39, 302-303;Lewis, 1975: 40-41).
The findings obtained, which confirm the hypothesis entertained in this study, could be interpreted as evidence of a greater acceptance of intrusive /r/ after vowels other than schwa, suggesting then a change in attitudes towards the use of intrusive /r/ not only among phoneticians (see e.g. García-Lecumberri & Maidment, 2000: 34) but also by the general speech community (Fox, 1978: 74;Lewis, 1977: 30  The fifth research question looked at how frequent intrusive /r/ is at word-internal morpheme boundaries. For this analysis, only affixed words were considered, and not compounds. In the corpus analysed, five potential cases of intrusive /r/ across wordinternal morpheme boundaries were found. These five examples were four instances of the word withdrawal (in texts no. 60, 139 and 174) and one instance of the word drawing (text no. 305). Intrusive /r/ was found in all the instances of withdrawal (produced by three different speakers) but it did not occur in the word drawing.
The data obtained do not confirm the hypothesis entertained that intrusive /r/ is a particularly rare or infrequent phenomenon in word-internal position. However, the few items of potential intrusive /r/ in word-internal position do not permit to make any strong claims about the frequency of the former in that position nor generalisations applicable to words other than withdrawal. In this respect, instances of verbs in the gerund form, for instance, should be studied more carefully since it has been suggested, referring explicitly to the word drawing that "many speakers of present-day RP pronounce /r/ in this sort of word" (García-Lecumberri & Maidment, 2000: 34). In fact, a random inspection of broadcasts from other years on the BBC World Service website not analysed for this study revealed that intrusive /r/ is often heard in verbs in the gerund form (e.g. redrawing in "European Union Enlargement" by Tim Franks,9 th October 2002). The tentative conclusion that can be drawn, though, is that intrusive /r/ is gaining ground at word-internal morpheme boundaries (at least in the case of /ɔ:/ and particularly in the word withdrawal). This is not necessarily in contrast with opinions like Wells's (1982: 225) that there may be "more sentiment against intrusive /r/ wordinternally than across word boundaries" or more recent comments that intrusive /r/ is "acceptable between words but is sometimes frowned upon when it occurs within Whether /r/-liaison is generally avoided or not when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/ was the focus of the seventh research question investigated in this paper.
In the corpus analysed, there are 15 potential cases of linking /r/ in which the last syllable making the potential link begins with /r/. These cases involve the words interior, error, rare, terror, manufacturer, the proper name Federer, and the expression there are -with a link already made between there and are-(see Appendix F). Table 5 shows the number and rate of use of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ in syllables that do and do not begin with /r/ (see also figure 6 for the rates). The analysis of the results shows that linking /r/ is used in 5 cases (33%), a third of all potential cases of linking /r/ preceded by /r/ in the same syllable. This seems to refute the claim that the link is "generally made" (Lewis, 1975: 38) when the syllable begins with /r/ and provides more support to the less strong claim that linking /r/ is "not as a rule inserted" (Jones, 1956: 112) in this context. As far as the hypothesis entertained in this study is concerned (i.e. that /r/-liaison will be generally avoided when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/), the results obtained provide some support to the hypothesis.
Regarding intrusive /r/, there are 27 potential cases in the corpus in which the syllable likely to make the link begins with /r/ and 9 instances in which the link is actually made, which represents 33% of all potential cases. However, this percentage is very similar to the rate of intrusive /r/ when the syllable does not begin with /r/ (i.e. 31%) and the differences between both percentages are not statistically significant (2.17%, 95% CI = -17.21, 21.56%, p < 0.05). A Z-Test for 2 sample proportions also shows that the difference in proportions is not statistically significant at a 95% (z-value = 0.222, 1-tailed p = 0.412 > 0.05, 2-tailed p = 0.824 > 0.05). These results seem to suggest that, if there is any tendency to avoid r-sounds in the nearby contexts (i.e. dissimilation), the effect is not appreciated in the corpus analysed for intrusive /r/ probably because the latter occurs at a relatively low rate independently of whether the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/ or not (i.e. 31.5%). Interestingly, the rate of linking /r/ when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/ is the same (i.e. 33%) as the rate of intrusive /r/ in the same condition but the former is lower than the percentage of linking /r/ in syllables that do no begin with /r/ (i.e. 58%). This difference in percentages (i.e. 33% and 58%) is statistically significant (-24.97, 95% CI = -49.03, -0.92%, p < 0.05). A deeper analysis would reveal, though, that the distance between the upper interval (i.e. -0.92) and 0 is not great, so the difference in percentages is significant by very little. In fact, a Z-Test for 2 sample proportions indicates that the significance for difference in proportions is not statistically significant at a 95% (z-value = -1.944, 1-tailed p = 0.026 < 0.05, 2-tailed p = 0.052 > 0.05). The bilateral significance 2-tailed p value is 0.052, which shows that the difference is not statistically significant by very little. As can be seen, the test performed reveals ambiguous results, which may be due to the reduced size of the sample of syllables beginning with /r/ and potential /r/-liaison. This shows that the archive should be expanded to include more potential cases to obtain more conclusive evidence on the effect of the presence of /r/ at the beginning of the syllable that would make the link.

Type of syllable
Another interesting aspect in relation to the potential use of intrusive /r/ after syllables that start with /r/ is that out of the 14 potential cases of intrusive /r/ in which the syllable that would make the link begins with a consonant cluster ending in /r/, the link is made in 6 cases (43%), all of them instances of the word withdrawal (4 cases), the verb to draw (2 cases). This seems to provide some support to Lewis's claim that, often when the link syllable is unstressed and begins with a consonant cluster ending with /r/ (e.g. algebra, Sandra, orchestra, etc.) or contains a syllabic consonant (e.g. Barbara /ˈbɑ:br̟ ̝ ̟ ə/, camera /ˈkaemr̝ ə/, opera /ˈɒpr̝ ə/, etc.) the link is avoided (ibid.).
Surprisingly, though, the percentage is higher than the one in which no cluster is present, but again this may be due possibly to some sort of lexicalisation or entrenchment specific to the word withdrawal.  The eighth and last research question investigated in this study was how frequent /r/-liaison is in common expressions and collocations. The hypothesis formulated in this study is that /r/-liaison will be frequent in common expressions/collocations.
As far as linking /r/ is concerned, Jones (1956: 113) mentions after all and for example/instance as common expressions where linking /r/ is regularly found. In the corpus analysed, expressions like after all could not be satisfactorily studied since they appear only on one occasion (text no. 108). The same happens to other expressions like a matter of, found only twice (texts no. 113 & 262). After inspecting the corpus, only two expressions seemed to be relatively frequent to merit analysis: for instance/example and the/a number of (see Appendix H). Regarding the expression for instance/example, 13 instances were found in the corpus and in all of them a linking /r/ was found (100%).
In the expressions the/a number of, found on 25 occasions, linking /r/ was used in 23 cases (92%). These percentages suggest that linking /r/ may be highly frequent in common expressions and collocations (even categorical or nearly categorical in some cases) and more frequent than the average percentage of linking /r/ in the corpus (females and males combined), i.e. 58% (see Table 2 above). In fact, the difference in percentages is statistically significant in the case of for instance/for example (34.07, 95% CI = 38.99, 45.16%, p < 0.05) and the/a number of (34.07, 95% CI = 23, 45.15%, p < 0.05).
The study of the expressions for instance/example and the/a number of provides then some support to the hypothesis formulated in this study that /r/-liaison will be frequent in common expressions/collocations. This could be interpreted as lexicalisation or entrenchment of /r/-liaison not only in common expressions/collocations but also generally in certain words. This might be the case of the word withdrawal discussed above. Withdrawal is pronounced with intrusive /r/ in all four examples in the corpus, when the expectation would have been that intrusive /r/ in word-internal position should be a rare phenomenon.
Unfortunately, no data can be offered regarding common expressions with potential intrusive /r/. Two relatively common expressions mentioned in the literature like the idea of and law and order could not be studied satisfactorily since the former was only found once (text. no 103) -with intrusive /r/-and the latter was not found in the corpus.

Conclusion
The phenomenon of /r/-liaison has long been the focus of academic interest, although detailed empirical studies of the phenomenon have been scarce up to now, most noticeably in the case of RP. Given this scarcity of empirical evidence, the present paper has tried to look into the usage patterns of /r/-liaison in a variety of non-rhotic English called RP. The study was conducted under the assumption, in accordance with much recent work in Cognitive Linguistics, that a data-driven approach provides new insights into the phenomena under investigation and that a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of /r/-liaison (or any other phonological phenomenon) requires an analysis of the different aspects that shape it, discussed in this paper under the headings of cognitive, linguistic, sociolinguistic and phonetic.
The main finding of this study regarding the cognitive component of /r/-liaison is that intrusive /r/ remains a stigmatised phenomenon in RP. The difference between the rate of occurrence of both linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ is statistically significant, which reveals that, although the two processes are phonetically the same, people's ideas about the correctness of intrusive /r/ are affecting the linguistic usage patterns in their speech.
This finding may be incidentally supported by the fact that linking /r/ occurs at a rate (i.e. 59%) possibly lower than would have been expected in colloquial speech, which seems to be a feature of scripted broadcast speech. This lower incidence of linking /r/ could be explained as a result of the tendency to avoid intrusive /r/ from their speech at the expense of eliminating linking /r/s too (Wells & Colson, 1971: 95).
As regards the sociolinguistic component of /r/-liaison, the study reveals that there are no modern RP speakers who never produce linking /r/ and that there are not statistically significant differences between males and females in /r/-liaison usage. This latter finding might be due, as explained above, either to males' extra efforts to avoid intrusive /r/ -supposedly because they would tend to use it more than women-or to females' willingness to copy males' speech habits once the former have access to jobs traditionally monopolised by men like newsreading, where female newsreaders were less common in the middle of the twentieth century and before.
The study conducted also reveals that, as far as the linguistic aspect of /r/-liaison is concerned, intrusive /r/ is not necessarily a rare or infrequent phenomenon in wordinternal position, that linking /r/ is frequently inserted in compound words and that linking /r/ is a highly frequent phenomenon in common expressions/collocations, which reveals the effects of linguistic usage as described in the current Cognitive Linguistics literature under the heading of 'usage-based' models.
Finally, the study of the phonetic aspect of /r/-liaison reveals that intrusive /r/ is not only common after back vowels like /ɔ:/ but it may also be more frequent than after a central vowel, which may be explained by the phonetic similarity between back vowels and post-alveolar approximants. The study has also shown that /r/-liaison is often avoided when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/, which can be explained as a tendency to avoid similar sounds in adjacent positions. However, it is not very clear whether there is a statistically significant difference between use of linking /r/ when the syllable that would make the link begins with /r/ and when the syllable does not begin with it. The ambiguous results may be due to the relatively few potential cases found in the corpus, which suggests that the corpus analysed should be expanded to find more evidence in relation to this question. Such an expansion may also help obtain a clearer picture of all the other questions investigated in this study for which more evidence would be welcome (e.g. the frequency of /r/-liaison in word-internal position, compounds, collocations, etc.).
Despite the evidence found, more studies should be conducted in order to gain further knowledge about other factors that may shape the phenomenon of /r/-liaison as they relate to the latter's different aspects (i.e. cognitive, sociolinguistic, linguistic and phonetic). To start with, and in an attempt to provide more evidence on the cognitive aspect of /r/-liaison, surveys of speakers' conceptions and perceptions about /r/-liaison usage should also be conducted to find out, for instance, to what extent intrusive /r/ continues to be perceived as a stigmatised phenomenon.
A limitation in the study of the sociolinguistic aspect of /r/-liaison is that diachronic change could not be investigated since the year of birth of the speakers is not known. In this respect, speakers' age has been claimed to affect variability in /r/-liaison usage. Jones (1960: 197) claimed that "there appears to be an increasing tendency, especially among younger people, not to use linking /r/ at all" (emphasis added). Bauer Regarding the linguistic aspect of the phenomenon, it would be interesting to look at potential differences in the occurrence of /r/-liaison due to stylistic variation.
According to Brown (1988: 145), there is "clearly stylistic variation in the phenomenon; use of linking/intrusive /r/ is a feature of fluent colloquial style, and is not so common in careful declarative style". This is contrary to Ramsaran's (1983) claim that the use of linking /r/ does not vary with formality in RP. Since the corpus studied only contains a formal, careful, declarative style, where speakers tend to be speech-conscious, it cannot offer a picture of /r/-liaison usage in informal, colloquial, spontaneous speech. Further research with non-scripted speech is then needed. A further limitation of this study, as mentioned above, is that it did not allow to study in detail potential cases of intrusive /r/ in word-internal position of affixed words -since these were underrepresented-, in compounds, after certain vowels (particularly after /ɑ:/) or in common expressions like the idea of. Since broadcast speech allows little control over the types and tokens of the phenomena that can be investigated, it would then be convenient to elicit pronunciations from informants recruited by the researcher in order to investigate these issues.
Other questions that have been left unexplored regarding the phonetic aspect of /r/-liaison are whether rhythmic factors (e.g. the stressed/unstressed nature of the syllable following the syllable that makes the /r/-link) or intonational factors (e.g. presence/absence of an intonation boundary between the syllable making the link and the following vowel) condition /r/-liaison usage in some way. In this respect, Jones (1960: 197) claims that absence of linking /r/ may be common among some speakers particularly when the vowel following the word ending in /r/ is unstressed. A preliminary analysis of the corpus carried out looking at the occurrence of linking /r/ before the unstressed preposition of (see Appendix I) reveals that out of 114 cases of potential linking /r/ before unstressed of, linking /r/ was produced in 95 cases (83%), a figure that is higher than the average rate of linking /r/ in the corpus (i.e. 59%).
However, a more detailed study is necessary to provide stronger conclusions on the role of stress in /r/-liaison usage patterns.