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Tonal Adaptation Of Loanwords In Mandarin: Phonology And Beyond, Zhuting Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English and Japanese loanwords in Mandarin, and considers data collected from different types of sources. The purpose overall is to identify the mechanisms underlying the adaptation processes by which tone is assigned, and to check if the same mechanisms are invoked regardless of donor languages and source types. Both corpus and experimental methods were utilized to survey a broad sampling of borrowings and a wide array of syllable types that target specific phonetic properties.

To maximally rule out the effect of semantic tingeing, this study examined English place names that were extracted from …