Phonological Remarks on Spanish Loanwords in English

This paper focuses on loanword phonology in the context of Spanish words that have become part of the English lexicon in the 20th century. The background section shows that attention has been paid to Spanish words used in English from a lexical point of view, but scarcely regarding phonology. Furthermore, the few existing studies of loanword phonology do not deal in depth with Spanish and English as an example of crosslinguistic contact. Therefore, this paper aims at contributing to the explanation of the phonological adaptations occurring in Spanish words when integrated into English, and therefore the conditions of English phonology that operate in the process of perception and production of Spanish loanwords. In doing so, two areas of interest are analysed: vowel phonemes and consonant phonemes, mainly in relation to their distinctive features and the distribution of units and also considering related phenomena such as phonetic and orthographical factors.

Simple metathesis in loanword phonology: the Arabic-Romance language contact

Simple metathesis can be found in numerous Ibero-Romance arabisms compared with their Andalusi Arabic etyma. The analysis of a corpus of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan arabisms illustrates its effects on syllable structure and syllable weight. It can be shown that Arabic-Romance simple metathesis constitutes a motivated structural change that provides for typologically unmarked syllable weight relations within the word. After the resyllabification it entails the involved unstressed syllables no longer excede the stressed syllable in weight. However, it is not an obligatory, systematic process, but merely an optional tendency, which corresponds to the universal tendency expressed by the Weight Law.

Probabilistic reduction in relation to social message predictability

Language is a system of message transmission, which conveys a variety of messages including both lexical messages and social messages. It has been demonstrated that lexical messages are realized with phonetically reduced signals, when they are contextually predictable. For example, a word may be produced with shorter duration, when it is more predictable given a context such as a preceding word and a following word. This message-oriented reduction can be encapsulated by positing that a speaker is required to balance two biases: a bias for maximizing the accuracy of message transmission and a bias for maximizing the efficiency of message transmission. This raises a question: Does a speaker balance the two biases in relation to social messages? The aim of this study is to address this question, and advance our understanding of the message-oriented probabilistic reduction. We will explore the social-message-predictability effects by examining the phonetic redundancy in a variant in New Zealand English loanword phonology, a tap sound [ɾ]. It is demonstrated that the duration of this rhotic variant is affected by the social message predictability given a loanword.

Gemination within English loanwords in Ammani Arabic: An Optimality-theoretic analysis

Adopting an Optimality-theoretic approach, this paper examines gemination in English loanwords in Ammani Arabic (AA). Data come from a corpus of 1200 loanwords as produced by 12 AA monolingual native speakers. Results show that gemination, which is not attested in the source input, is induced to satisfy AA structural constraints and to render the output better well-formed. Of particular interest, results show that the introduction of English loanwords into AA highlights the activity of a constraint that requires prosodic words in AA, and probably many Arabic dialects, to be left-aligned with a foot. This constraint enhances our understanding of many aspects of Arabic phonology such as stress assignment and foot formation. The study has important implications for Arabic phonology, loanword phonology and second language acquisition.

Non-Dravidian elements and (non)diasystematic change in Malayalam

By introducing a distinction between diaconstructions, which are language non-specific, and idioconstructions, which are language-specific, Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) cap- tures the fact that the borders between languages are often blurred (Höder 2012). Building on other construction-theoretic approaches, DCxG characterizes all languages as consisting of emergent sub-patterns of constructions. This includes hybrid or high-contact languages, which differ only in that those sub-patterns can be attributed (by analysts, not necessarily speakers) to a particular language. As such, DCxG provides an ideal framework for analyzing high-contact languages while also capturing smaller-scale contact effects. Crucially for those studying language contact, this does away with a need for a fundamental distinction between high- and low-contact languages (e.g., Faraclas & Klein 2009, Mufwene 2000).This chapter presents a DCxG analysis of non-Dravidian sounds and words in Malayalam, a Dravidian language with considerable influence from Sanskrit and English, as spoken in Kerala, India. Both Sanskrit- and English-origin words are highly frequent and appear across a variety of semantic domains. Analogous to Latinate and Germanic morphophonological sub-patterns in English, Sanskrit and English words in Malayalam have phonological patterns which are not found in Dravidian-origin words, such as heteroorganic clusters, certain codas, and voiced aspirated stops. I argue that any analysis of Malayalam must account for non-Dravidian sub-patterns, and I consider DCxG to be an attractive alternative to constraint-based approaches to loanword phonology.