Tonal adaptation of English loanwords in contemporary Mandarin
当代普通话对英语借词的声调调式研究
Li Jian 李健
Abstract 摘要
This study analyzes the tonal adaptation of a corpus of 340 English loanwords in Mandarin. I present evidence that only stressed/unstressed distinction is considered for disyllabic and monosyllabic loans. My principal finding is that the perceptual adaptation, stress-to-tone mapping is constrained primarily by tonal feature model of native phonology, while acoustic similarity plays a very limited role. Besides, other factors, such as vowel length of the donor language, and Mandarin Grammar including tonal gaps derived from tonogenesis and even euphemism also account for the tonal assignment.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Loanword 借词 Tonal adaptation 声调调整 Stress-to-tone mapping 重音-声调的对应关系 Vowel length 元音时长
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.45, no.2 (June 2017): 423-450
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