Hypothesis/research question What is the „linking r“? Where and when does it occur?

Method Practical procedure: Collecting information on the topic Listening to the cassette in order to find/record examples Analysis of the literature and the examples from the cassette concerning our research question

Results The following sentence: ”Where is Ben?” consists of separate units placed next to each other in sequence. That is why an inexperienced speaker would pronounce this sentence like this: /we   z ben/

Results However, in real connected speech we sometimes link words together in special ways. The most familiar case is the use of “linking r”, as you can hear in the following examples:

Results Sound files Where is Ben? The next day the friends are in the garden shed again. You can play for an hour now. The door and the cupboard are dirty, too. The door is open.

Results In the sound file the sentence “Where is Ben?” is pronounced: /we  r_  ben/

Interpretation of the results A word sounds different depending on whether it is enunciated very carefully as a single word or uttered in the flow of speech.

Interpretation of the results As the examples show us, a word-final post-vocalic  r  is pronounced if the following word begins with a vowel, e. g. /we  r_  ben/. This phenomenon is often called “liaison”, and the “linking r” is one of them.

References  literature: Roach P 2000: English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge Gramley S & Pätzold K-M 1999: A Survey of Modern English. London  Cassette for the sound files: Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag 1984: Learning English Green Line 1. Stuttgart