Abstract
The phonemic status of prevocalic, post-volcalic, and syllabic /r/ in American English is explored using speech error evidence. Post-vocalic /r/ and /l/ do not behave like glides or other consonants. It is argued that, unlike glides, they are not a part of the vowel, but, unlike consonants, they are part of the syllable nucleus rather than the syllable coda. Syllabic /r/ and /l/ show some error-patterns characteristic of vowels, and other error-patterns characteristic of consonants. Even sophisticated attempts to treat syllabic /r/ and /l/ as vowels fail. All variants of /r/ and /l/ are members of a single consonant phoneme. Phonemes thus apparently do not contain a feature for syllabicness; that must be imposed on the segment from an external source, such as the syllable structure.
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