Loan phonology

For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language's sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena.

Loan phonology: issues and controversies / Andrea Calabrese & W. Leo Wetzels -- Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception / Paul Boersma & Silke Hamann -- Perception, production and acoustic inputs in loanword phonology / Andrea Calabrese -- The adaptation of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French / Michael L. Friesner -- Mandarin adaptations of coda nasals in English loanwords / Feng-fan Hsieh, Michael Kenstowicz & Xiaomin Mou -- Korean adaptation of English affricates and fricatives in a feature-driven model of loanword adaptation / Hyunsoon Kim -- The role of underlying representations in L2 Brazilian English / Andrew Nevins & David Braun -- Early bilingualism as a source of morphonological rules for the adaptation of loanwords: Spanish loanwords in Basque / Miren Lourdes Oñederra -- Nondistinctive features in loanword adaptation: the unimportance of English aspiration in Mandarin Chinese phoneme categorization / Carole Paradis & Antoine Tremblay -- Gemination in English loans in American varieties of Italian / Lori Repetti -- Nasal harmony and the representation of nasality in Maxacalí: Evidence from Portuguese loans / W. Leo Wetzels -- Index of subjects and terms.