Phonetics vs. phonology in loanword adaptation: Revisiting the role of the bilingual

Chang, C. B.

Abstract

Following phonological and phonetic models of loanword adaptation, I present evidence from Burmese in favor of an intermediate model of loanword adaptation incorporating both language-independent phonetics and language-particular phonology. On the basis of a corpus of 200 loanword adaptations from English into Burmese, I first show that Burmese loanword adaptation involves a phonological scansion of phonemically relevant detail, as well as a phonetic scansion of phonemically irrelevant detail. These findings suggest that a model of loanword adaptation incorporating both phonetics and phonology is the most empirically sound. While loanword adaptations are indeed highly influenced by phonetic similarity, bilinguals play a leading role in adaptation, allowing the phonology of L2 to have a profound effect on adaptations in L1. The relative ranking of these phonetic and phonological considerations, then, appears to be a language-specific matter.

Citation

Chang, C. B. (2012). Phonetics vs. phonology in loanword adaptation: Revisiting the role of the bilingual. In S. Berson, A. Bratkievich, D. Bruhn, A. Campbell, R. Escamilla, A. Giovine, L. Newbold, M. Perez, M. Piqueras-Brunet, & R. Rhomieux (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Information Structure (61-72). Berkeley Linguistics Society

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Nov 21, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 3, 2025
• Pages: 61-72
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Information Structure
• Publisher URL: https://googledrive.com/host/0B1_NoAiLQlnkZ2kwQlFrVmRIZVU/Chang_BLS34.pdf
• Related Public URLs: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/