The phonological determinants of tone in English loanwords in Mandarin

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.

Phonotactics of Gender in Mandarin Given Names: Patterns and Constraints

“…The results in Table 14 indicate that the high(-level) T1 was biased towards the 'small' response while the 4 In the smaller-sized samples, a much greater proportion of male names contain at least one T2 syllablethis is because 78.80% and 92.67% of male names in the top 500 and top 150 samples, respectively, contain at least one of the characters 明 /miŋ35/, 文 /wən35/, 国 /kwo35/, 华 /xwa35/; a much greater proportion of female names contain at least one T4 syllablethis is because 36.40% and 41.33% of female names in the top 500 and top 150 samples respectively contain the character 丽 /li:53/. 5 A similar asymmetry between segmental and tonal factors is found in Mandarin loanword adaptation: when there is a choice between changing a segmental feature or a tonal property in order to bring the loan into agreement with the Mandarin lexicon, it is faithfulness to the segmental factor that typically wins out (Wu 2006;Glewwe 2021;a.o. ).…”