intrusion (n.)

A term used occasionally in PHONETICS and PHONOLOGY to refer to the addition of sounds in CONNECTED SPEECH which have no basis in the pronunciation of the SYLLABLES or WORDS heard in isolation. The most wellknown example in English (RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION) is the intrusive /r/ which is introduced as a LINKING FORM after a VOWEL, when the following word begins with a vowel, where there is no historical justification for it (i.e. there is no r in the spelling). Examples such as law(r) and order, India(r) and Pakistan, and (within word) draw(r)ings are common, and attract much criticism, though the frequency with which such forms are heard (the critics not excluded) indicates that the tendency of this ACCENT to link words in this way is deep-rooted. But one may hear other cases of intrusion, such as the introduction of an unstressed, SCHWA vowel between CONSONANTS in such words as athletics .

As with the opposite effect, ELISION, traditional rhetoric had devised a classification of types of intrusion in terms of the position of the extra sound in a word: in word-INITIAL position, it was termed PROTHESIS, in word-MEDIAL position ANAPTYXIS or EPENTHESIS, and in word-FINAL position PARAGOGE. In phonetic analyses of modern languages, too, reference to a ‘prothetic’ vowel or an ‘epenthetic’ vowel is often encountered.