This thesis offers a theoretical and empirical study of rhoticity and sandhi ‘r’ in English. The great phonetic variability of so called “rhotic” consonants and their stable phonological behaviour lead us to an analysis of these segments based on the sonority of units and their distribution within syllables. Our analysis is couched within the framework of Dependency Phonology whose representations are based on unary phonological primes and offer a better understanding of sonority scales than traditional binary features. We provide a theoretical interpretation of the vocalization of /r/ in the south of England based on an historical study of its evolution. An empirical section is dedicated to the study of rhoticity and sandhi ‘r’ in two corpora collected in Lancashire (UK) and Boston (USA) following the protocol and methodology of the PAC project (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain : usages, variétés et structure/ Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure)
