Posted on Saturday, October 28, 2006 10:05 AM
From the point of view of the phonology-phonetics interface, /r/ is easily the most interesting consonant of Dutch: its phonetic realisation is extremely varied, although its phonology (e.g. its phonotactics) seems rather uniform across dialects. Furthermore, it involves a few processes for which it is debatable whether they are phonological or phonetic: lengthening of the preceding vowel and colouring of the preceding vowel.
Leendert Plug aims to move Towards an integrated phonetic and phonological account of postvocalic /r/ in Dutch. But maybe the most interesting bit in this paper is a new observation which remains unexplained: word-final coronal obstruents tend to have a stronger release when preceded by /r/ than when they are preceded by a vowel.