Boundary disputes and sociophonetic variation: schwa-epenthesis in Dutch rC clusters

Abstract

Dutch schwa-epenthesis in liquid+consonant clusters has been the subject of a “boundary dispute”, as to its phonetic or phonological status. There has been surprisingly little instrumental work on the phenomenon that could function as an arbiter in this dispute. This paper attempts to remedy this situation by bringing results from a corpus of sociophonetic variation data to bear on the issue, focussing on the duration of the epenthesised schwa and variability of /r/ in rC clusters. The results show that both phonetic and phonological factors may be at play, and that there are intricate patterns of dialectal variation, highlighting the relevance of sociophonetic data on phonetics-phonology interface issues.