An Ot Account Of Liquid Adaptation In Chinese Loanword Phonology

Three major approaches to loanword phonology can be distinguished in the literature, viz.（i） the phonological approach （ii） the perceptual approach （iii） a combined perceptual-phonological approach. However, both the phonological approach and perceptual approach fail to account for the exceptional cases. It is argued that the combined perceptual-phonological approach better accounts for loanword phonology. To this end, this thesis focuses on liquid adaptation in English-based Mandarin Chinese （MC） loanwords which lends support to the combined perceptual-phonological approach.Through an investigation into liquid adaptation based on corpus data and a perceptual experiment on English nonsense words, this thesis has demonstrated that both the phonological rules of recipient language and perception play a role in loanword adaptation, in particular liquid adaptation in MC loanword phonology. This argues in favor of a combined approach in which the input to the process of loanword adaptation is based on how borrowers perceive the acoustic signals of the donor language. Then the perceptual input is adapted in accordance with the recipient phonological grammar.More importantly, this thesis has demonstrated that loanword adaptation can be understood as the result of the interaction between Optimality-Theoretic constraints. In building an OT model for liquid adaptation in MC loanword phonology, this thesis has pointed out that onset and coda liquids are governed by universal constraints i.e. phonotactic constraints in English and MC but differ in constraint hierarchies within the framework of OT. The two constraint hierarchies in MC loanwords are presented here:（1）*/r_/σ>>*/₁/σ, Prosodic Naturalness>>Max-IO, Ident-IO（[lateral]）> Dep-IO;（2）*/₁/σ>>*/r_/σ, Prosodic Naturalness>>Max-IO, Ident-IO（[lateral]）> Dep-IO. Last but not least, some limitations of this thesis and suggestions for further research are pointed out in the last chapter.