Internal /r/ epenthesis as gestural overlap in a memphis English emergent sound change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Temporal overlap of speech movements has occasionally been invoked as a post-hoc explanation for the historical emergence of a complex speech sound. An extreme case of this concerns so-called “internal” r-epenthesis in English dialects, limited to lexicalized pronunciations such as “warsh,” “Warshington,” “squarsh,” and “garsh” in the Midland US, as well as “erster” and “berl” (for “oyster” and “boil”) in many coastal dialects [Gick, 1999, Phonology 16]; Gick (p. 33, 50–51) hypothesizes an originating process for these forms in which the three component movements of English /r/ (i.e., lip-rounding, anterior tongue-raising and pharyngeal constriction), all present in the surrounding “rising” VC or VV sequences, temporally overlap, resulting in the “percept of an /r/.” However, this hypothesis has been untestable as only two such examples are attested, both representing long-frozen sound changes. We report an apparently relevant in-progress sound change in Memphis English (ME), a dialect exhibiting the Southern Vowel Shift [Fridland, 1999, Lang. Var. Change 11]. Videos of younger ME speakers are analyzed in which internal r-epenthesis is replacing the falling diphthong [ju] in words, such as “human,” “Cuba,” “music,” etc. Preliminary observations support a temporal overlap hypothesis; acoustic/structural analysis will be presented and implications discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".