Mechanisms of sub-phonemic change in prescriptive bilingualism: The case of Mexican Plautdietsch

This paper investigates the relationship between loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing by looking at the Mexican Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch borrowings from Mexican Spanish sometimes undergo loanword adaptation to fit the native phonological system (e.g. Spanish [peso] > Plautdietsch [pəɪzo] 'peso'), but some community members exhibit a borrowed pattern of deaffrication that targets native lexical items (e.g. [dit͡ʃ ]) 'German' > [diʃ]). I show that the output of /t͡ʃ/ deaffrication in Mexican Plautdietsch follows the phonological pattern of northern Mexican Spanish deaffrication, rather than an inherited pattern that adapts loanwords from High German and Russian. I propose that while some mechanisms of phonetic and phonological interpretation are similar for both loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing, the novel Mexican Spanish pattern could have only entered the community due to the unique structure of phonological representation associated with advanced bilingualism. This prediction is borne out in the social distribution of deaffrication wherein men, who are expected to become advanced bilinguals, exhibit the innovation more than women. By adding a dimension of phonological representation to our models of loanword adaptation, we can expand the model's behavior to also account for outcomes involving the restructuring of the heritage language.

Strategi Adaptasi Kata Pinjaman dalam Bahasa Bugis: Koresponden-OO

Sebagai masyarakat minoriti di Malaysia, masyarakat Bugis cenderung menyerap masuk leksikal daripada bahasa lain khususnya daripada masyarakat tempatan di kawasan mereka akibat daripada proses asimilasi yang berlaku. Justeru, kajian ini dilakukan untuk menjawab persoalan: (1) bagaimana strategi adaptasi kata pinjaman yang digunakan dalam penyerapan leksikal asing ke dalam bahasa Bugis, dan­­­­ (2) bagaimana strategi adaptasi yang berlaku itu dapat dijelaskan menggunakan pendekatan ­­­Koresponden-OO yang dibangunkan dalam teori Optimaliti. Data telah dikumpulkan melalui kaedah lapangan dan temu bual dengan menggunakan instrumen borang soal selidik, daftar kata.dan alat rakaman.Kajian lapangan dijalankan di Pontian dan Pasir Gudang, Johor serta di Klang, Selangor. Seramai 144 informan daripada tiga kumpulan umur, iaitu warga muda, warga dewasa dan warga tua terlibat dalam menjawab soal selidik dan daftar kata. Hasil dapatan menunjukkan lapan strategi adaptasi kata pinjaman digunakan dalam bahasa Bugis, iaitu peleburan, pengguguran, penggantian segmen, epentesis, perendahan vokal, penggantian nasal, pembentukan hentian glotis dan geminasi. Analisis Koresponden-OO menunjukkan sifat bahasa Bugis yang tidak bertoleransi dengan nahu asing dengan melarang penyerapan penuh leksikal asing yang dipinjam. Hal ini dapat dilihat pada keperluan mematuhi kekangan kebertandaan *LEKSIKAL SAMA yang mendominasi kekangan-kekangan lain dalam tatatingkat nahu bahasa Bugis. Hasil kajian ini dapat membekalkan input kepada aspek bahasa masyarakat Bugis di Malaysia yang telah dikesampingkan sebelum ini, dan berjaya menunjukkan kemampuan Koresponden-OO dalam menjelaskan isu kata pinjaman tanpa mengingkari konsep penting teori Optimaliti, iaitu Keselarian. Kata Kunci: kata pinjaman; strategi adaptasi; bahasa Bugis; teori Optimaliti; Koresponden-OO ABSTRACT As a minority community in Malaysia, the Bugis community tends to utilise lexical items from other languages, particularly from local languages as a result of the assimilation process that took place. Thus, this study was conducted to answer the following questions: (1) how are the loanword adaptation strategies used in absorbing foreign language lexical items into the Bugis language, and (2) how can these adaptation strategies be explained by using the Correspondence-OO approach developed in Optimality theory. Data were collected through field methods and interviews using questionnaire, word list and recording. The field studies were conducted in Pontian and Pasir Gudang, Johor as well as in Klang, Selangor. A total of 144 informants from three age groups, namely among the youth, adults and the elderly who were involved in answering the questionnaire and wordlist. The results revealed that eight loanword adaptation strategies were used in Bugis language, namely fusion, deletion, segment substitution, epenthesis, vowel reduction, nasal substitution, glottal stop formation and gemination. The Correspondence-OO analysis showed an element of Bugis language which is intolerant of foreign grammars by prohibiting the full absorption of borrowed foreign lexical items. This can be observed from the needs to comply with a markedness constraint *SAME LEXICAL, that dominates other constraints in the grammar of the Bugis language. The findings of the study can shed input on the language aspects of the Bugis community in Malaysia that were previously excluded. In addition, it has successfully demonstrated the capability of Correspondence-OO in explaining the issue of loanwords without denying the important concept of Optimality theory, namely Parallelism. Keywords: loanword; adaptation strategy; Bugis language; Optimality theory; Correspondence-OO

The phonological determinants of tone in English loanwords in Mandarin

This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.

Sonority Principle in French Nominal Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic: An Optimality-theoretic Analysis

This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morphologically driven, indirectly satisfies sonority principle; by doing so, it blocks the application of schwa or a high vowel epenthesis, which points to the fact that such phonological and morphological strategies conspire to satisfy sonority principle. The study also provides further support for the phonological stance on loanword adaptation.

Variation in loanword adaptation: A case from Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno → bù.lŭ .n uò), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel → dā n.n í.ěr), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany → dì.fú. n í or dì.fē n.n í). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016) identified two factors that may induce the nasal gemination repair: (1) when stress falls on the pre-nasal vowel and (2) when the pre-nasal vowel is a non-high lax vowel. They hypothesized that Mandarin Chinese speakers insert a nasal coda to perceptually approximate the stronger nasalization and longer syllable duration associated with the stressed syllables, and the shorter vowel duration of a lax vowel because the vowels in closed syllables are shorter in Mandarin. The results from two forced-choice identification experiments and an open-ended transcription task showed that although Mandarin speakers’ choices of different repairs were indeed biased by the different phonetic manipulations, suggesting an effect of perceptual similarity, their decisions were mainly guided by native phonotactics. The overall findings suggest that phonotactic, phonetic, as well as non-linguistic (i.e. frequency) factors interact with each other, resulting in the variable adaptation pattern.

ADAPTATION STRATEGIES OF RUSSIAN PHONETIC LOANWORDS IN CHINESE. PHONETIC AND GRAPHIC ASPECTS

This article considers phonetic and graphic transformations of Russian loanwords in Chinese. The study comprises an analysis of both proper and common nouns, as well as both loanwords included in dictionaries and those used in the Internet. The data considered make it possible to detect the main trends in the adaptation of Russian consonants in Chinese, as well as to localize the hypothetical influence of the Russian-Chinese pidgin on current loanword adaptation in Mandarin Chinese. It is noted that there is a dramatic discrepancy between the norms of transliteration prescribed by the PRC media and the usage in the Internet. Furthermore, a significant level of specificity of the hieroglyphic N-grams in the loanwords is revealed, compared to the reference corpus of the Chinese texts. The author expects that the results of the work will be useful for specialists both in phonetic typology and in NLP.