Socio-dialectological phonetic and phonological characterisation of Dutch /r/.

The aim of this project is to increase our insight into processes of language variation, and to develop and apply advances methods of investigations to its area of research. Its empirical focus will be on the Dutch liquid consonant /r/. In Dutch language area this consonant is produced in a large variety of ways, it is subject to rapid and interesting changes which are conditioned by both language internal factors as well as external ones. Dutch /r/-realizations include alveolar and uvular trills, velar and uvular fricatives, alvolar taps, retroflexes and approximants. strangly enough, in spite of the large amount of interest it has attracted the properties of /r/ are seriously underresearched, and in this sense this proposal aims to fill a clear empirical and descriptive gap. In order to come to grips with the nature and the behaviour of Dutch /r/ this sound will be studied from the ngles of both production and perception. Expertise from phonetics, phonology and variation studies will be combined in the enterprise. the investigation will employ large speech corpuses, both existing and newly assembled ones.