Modeling Salience and Prosody in Loanword Adaptation: Cases of English [ɹ] in Mandarin

Abstract

This paper probes the effects of phonetic salience and prosody on patterned lexical variation in word-loaning processes, regarding the retention/deletion of [ɹ] from English input to the corresponding underlying representations perceived by Mandarin speakers. Based on a sizable corpus, while the adaptation of English [ɹ] varies on a word-by-word basis, the percentage distribution of retention/deletion is observed to be conditioned by a handful of factors of phonetic salience, specifically position, sonority and similarity/dissimilarity, and prosodic preference for binary feet in Mandarin. The patterned distribution in loanword adaptation is appropriately modeled in stochastic evaluations (Boersma 1997, 1998, Boersma & Hayes 2001), which better capture this insight through the key notions of seeing constraints as ranges of value on a linear scale of strictness, and, insofar as the ranking values of two mutually contradictory constraints are close enough, overlapping is inevitable, i.e. the area where dominance between them may be reversed and which results in variation.