Journal of Chinese Linguistics

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.

提要:

本研究对收集到的普通话中 340 个英语借词作为语料库进行了音调调试方面的分析。研究证实了普通话只对英语单音节和双音节原词中的重音/非重音这一差别进行考量。本文的主要发现包括：感知上的调整，即重音-声调的对应关系，是受普通话声调特征模式制约的；而声学上的近似原则只发挥了很有限的作用。此外，其它因素，诸如英语原词中的元音时长、声调起源造成的某些音节的声调缺失、甚至是普通话中的委婉语都成为了声调调试过程中的考虑因素。