TONAL ADAPTATION OF ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN CONTEMPORARY MANDARIN

This study analyzes the tonal adaptation of a corpus of 340 English loanwords in Mandarin. I present evidence that only stressed/unstressed distinction is considered for disyllabic and monosyllabic loans. My principal finding is that the perceptual adaptation, stress-to-tone mapping is constrained primarily by tonal feature model of native phonology, while acoustic similarity plays a very limited role. Besides, other factors, such as vowel length of the donor language, and Mandarin Grammar including tonal gaps derived from tonogenesis and even euphemism also account for the tonal assignment.