An OT Approach To The English Transliterating Loanwords In Hong Kong Cantonese

As an important element of the Hong Kong Cantonese vocabulary, English loanwords hasbecame a feature of Hong Kong Cantonese and it attracts the linguists’ attention. Many linguistsbegan to study on it. However, many of the research were based on the data and made thepragmatic studies, which tried to find out the reason of its occurrence, its linguistic features as wellas its social functions. Few of them have tried to study its reason of phonological transformation.Thus, this thesis will try to discuss the phonological transformation in the word-borrowing processfrom English to Cantonese from the perspective of the Optimality Theory.Optimality Theory has been applied to every linguistic field even to the language teachingand acquisition since it has been formulated by Prince and Smolensky (1993) in the1990’s. Themain idea of this theory is that all languages are assumed to possess to be the most harmonic oroptimal in the sense that it minimally violates or best satisfies a set of hierarchically rankedconstraints with the other potential surface forms.The introduction and study on the syllable structure is central in the thesis. The syllablestructure of Hong Kong Cantonese as well as English has been studied in the thesis.(Ci)V(Cf) isthe syllable structure I adopt. Consonant clusters are not allowed in Hong Kong Cantonese, andonly certain occlusive (oral and nasal stop) consonants are allowed in the final position. In addition,the prosodic foot should be binary either on the syllable level or on the mora level.According to the syllable structure, the preliminary constraints and their rankings are OK->> DEP-IO>> MAX-IO. After a detailed study under the schema of Optimality Theory, certainconstraints which restrict the borrowing of English into Hong Kong Cantonese have been found,and the ranking is like follows:OK->> MAX-IO (O[P/F+L]L), ONSET, CODA[+son]>> DEP-IO...