Re: Intrusive r in rhotic dialects of English? (was: Phoneme analysis etc.)

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Ruud Harmsen wrote:
António Marques schreef:
Thank you, but it wasn't so much the terminology
that I found obscure as the apparent inference that
since the r was _called_ intrusive, it therefore was
inserted. How do you know it _is_ intrusive?

Ruud Harmsen wrote:
If it's not there in the spelling, it's intrusive.

I just heard Paul McCartney sing "Till there was you" via
http://www.pandora.com
What I heard was "I never sore them at all", with traces of a real r!
So I checked the lyrics:
http://www.stevesbeatles.com/songs/till_there_was_you.asp
and as expected, it is:
"No, I never saw them at all "
He also sings:
"No I never heard it at all "
with a sounded r in "heard"!

Questions:
1) Is there other evidence that PMcC is or was rhotic? I never noticed
it.
2) Could this be an imitation of an American accent? I think British
pop bands (Stones, Beatles) sometimes did that in that period (early
1960s? I think it's a pretty old song).
3) Some traces of some Liverpool accent? The whole song doesn't strike
me as such at all.
4) Are there any genuinely rhotic people (Ireland, UK or US?) who ever
would insert an instrusive r in "saw them", seeing there is NO vowel
following there?

My working hypothesis is he is not really rhotic, pretended to be to
sound fashionably American (but doesnt succeed, the song sounds very
British), and then applies his natural non-rhotic intrusive r instinct
in a very weird and unnatural way.
Any takers?

That's another of the things that falls into my category of "British
myths about American pronunciation." He wants to sound American,
doesn't know what American sounds like, so he sticks r's in just
anywhere.

Peter's antipathy to the British seems to override his knowledge of
linguistics here. This is in fact an example of what we were discussing
not many days ago on this group, namely hypercorrection. Yes, he's
trying to sound American, as the early Brit rockers often did (covered
in the well known paper by Trudgill). But no, he doesn't stick the r's
in "just anywhere", but after just those vowels where there is, in fact,
a common correspondence of American /r/ to British zero. Where he goes
wrong (the hypercorrection) is in generalizing the process to words
where there is no historic (and hence no American) /r/, such as "saw".
This will probably come out a mess, but I'm going to try a little 2x2
table to show the different cases:

___ V ___ C

Historic /r/ 1 2
No historic /r/ 3 4

Gemeral American has 1 and 2. RP with "linking r" has just 1. RP with
"intrusive r" has 1 and 3. I assume McCartney's native pronunciation had
1 or 1-3. In order to sound "American" he generalizes to 1-2-3-4 (though
probably not consistently). Of course this is still not "just anywhere",
since all of these cases are only after certain vowels (/@/, /@:/, /a:/,
/O:/).

Ross Clark
.

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