Tonal And Phonotactic Adaptation Of English Loanwords In Cantonese

This study examines the tonal and phonotactic adaptations of English loanwords inCantonese spoken in Hong Kong. This thesis is couched in the Optimality theory andanalyzes the corpus using the Perception-Phonology Approach, pointing out that forEnglish loanwords in Cantonese, the route for a loan to step into the recipient language isvia the interlanguage, and that the interlanguage serves as catalyst in causing more andmore source words to become loanwords and integrated into Cantonese. The thesis givescomprehensive analysis of English loanwords in three aspects: vowel, consonant and tonaladaptations. For the first two parts, each English vowel and consonant are listed withexamples to discuss their optimal outputs in the loanwords so as to conform to theCantonese native grammar. Constraints are proposed and cited and a hierarchy of rankedconstraints is applied to verify the optimal choice of outputs for the loanword adaptation.For the tonal adaptations, major tonal rules and major factors are illustrated and proposedin the analysis of English loanwords. Apart from the stress-to-tone mapping and high-tonemorpheme attachment, there are also other factors such as the word class, the morphologyand consonant types during the loanword adaptation.