Attractive as might seem the challenge to build a process or performance model that can account for every behavioural decision, there are a number of sound reasons to tackle first the still difficult (but hopefully manageable) task of developing a competence model ; of trying to find the underlying system that informs and constrains (if it doesn't always actually govern) choice.(Spolsky  : )This article aims at showing the predictability of phonological adaptation, segment preservation and deletion in borrowings. It is shown that ill-formed segments are preserved and adapted in the vast majority of cases ; segment deletion occurs only when an ill-formed segment is embedded within a higher level ill-formed structure, such as the syllable. This conclusion is based on the study of , segmental and syllabic malformations found in , loanword forms from five different corpora [] We are indebted to Peter Avery, Outi Bat-el, Rene! e Be! land, for illuminating comments and\or useful discussions. We would like to offer special thanks to Sharon Inkelas for very detailed written comments and stimulating discussions. We are also grateful to the audience at the MOT Conference on Contrast in Phonology, held at the University of Toronto in February , notably to Elan Dresher, . This paper has also benefited from the comments from three JL referees. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to our research assistants, especially Robert Neely, Yvan Rose, Caroline Lebel and Eliane Lebel for stimulating comments and questions, and our informants for their patience. We remain solely responsible for the views expressed here as well as for any remaining errors or omissions. C. Paradis acknowledges SSHRC grants T -- and T -- and FCAR grants T -NC- and -ER-, from which D. LaCharite! has also benefited. D. LaCharite! acknowledges SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship T --.     ! of loanwords. The analysis, which is set within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies, is illustrated with the data from a corpus of  French loanwords in Fula. I This article is concerned with the phonological adaptation of borrowings in general, and French borrowings in Fula in particular. Often, loanwords enter the borrowing language (L) with structures (that is, segments and sequences) that are, from the point of view of L, ill-formed. We maintain that such structures are repaired minimally (a notion formally defined in section , by universal phonological operations that are triggered by the constraints of L. This produces the sound adaptations in loanwords that we observe on the surface. We show also that the segmental information contained in borrowings is maximally preserved, a result of the Preservation Principle, which is formalised in section . Segments are deleted, as opposed to adapted, only when adaptation would exceed the Threshold Principle, also presented in . Our results support the view that the loanword input to the phonology of L...

In this article, we argue that loanword adaptation is overwhelmingly phonological and that phonetic approximation plays a limited role in the sound changes that loanwords undergo. Explicit criteria are used to compare the predictions of the phonetic approximation and phonological stances against 12 large corpora of recent English and French loanwords in several different languages. We show that category proximity is overwhelmingly preferred over perceptual proximity and that typical L2 perception/interpretation errors are not reflected in the adaptations of the loanwords of this database. Borrowers accurately identify L2 sound categories, operating on the mental representation of an L2 sound, not directly on its surface phonetic form.

Among 4,499 segmental malformations found in English loanwords in three large corpora of French, the laryngeal \h\ is the only segment that is never adapted, i.e. replaced by another segment. We suggest that the systematic deletion of \h\ in French follows from the fact that, phonologically, French, like Portuguese and Italian, does not employ the Pharyngeal node, the articulator that characterises gutturals. This prevents English \h\ from being handled phonologically (deleted or substituted) in those languages. The non-availability of the Pharyngeal node also explains systematic deletion of the pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Arabic loanwords in French. In contrast, English \h\ is adapted by languages employing the Pharyngeal node phonologically, such as Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and Russian. Likewise, the availability of the Pharyngeal node in Fula and English allows the adaptation of Arabic pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Fula, and non-glottal gutturals in English.* We would like to thank the editors of Phonology and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments in connection with the preparation of this article. We also benefited from the comments and questions of Ahmed Alioua, Jacques Durand, Ali Idrissi, Michael Kenstowicz, Pierre Martin, Jean-Franc: ois Prunet and Charles Ulrich on previous versions of this article. Ahmed Alioua, a phonetician from Safi (Morocco), and Nadir Kerris, from Setif (Algeria), checked the Arabic pronunciation of our Arabic loans in French, while Abdulhamid H. Gadoua, a PhD student in phonology who was born in Libya, verified the Arabic pronunciation of our Arabic loans in English. We are particularly indebted to Fre! de! rick Brault, one of our research assistants, for having collected the loanwords of the list appended to this article, checked them with native speaker consultants of European Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Russian, Italian and Portuguese, and for having taped, transcribed and computerised them. F. Brault also presented with C. Paradis a preliminary French version of this article at the annual meeting of ACFAS in 1998, and published that version with C. Paradis and D. LaCharite! in 1999. We are also extremely grateful to Fatim El Fenne for her transcriptions of Moroccan and Classical Arabic, and for the time she devoted to the collection of Arabic borrowings in French. We are indebted to Abdourahmane Sakho for his help with the pronunciation of Arabic borrowings in Mauritanian Fula and to our colleagues Ferna4 o Perestrello and Alexander Sadetsky for their help with Portuguese and Russian, respectively. Thank you also to our MA student E; lyse Bolduc for having processed her English loans in Mexican Spanish earlier than expected in order to provide us with statistics rapidly. More generally, we would like to thank all of our consultants and research assistants for their precious collaboration, and the people who kindly answered our questions on the Linguist List. Naturally, we are solely responsible...

A key debate in loanword adaptation is whether the process is primarily phonetic or phonological. Is it possible that researchers on each side are viewing equally plausible, but different, scenarios? Perhaps, in some language situations, adaptation is carried out mainly by those without access to L2 phonology and is, perforce, perceptually driven. In other situations, adaptation may be done by bilinguals who actively draw upon their knowledge of L2 phonology in adapting loanwords. The phonetic strategy would most likely be favored in situations where the vast majority of the population did not know the L2, thus having no possible access to the L2 phonological system. The phonological strategy, on the other hand, is most likely to be favored in situations where there is a high proportion of speakers who are bilingual in the L1 and L2. This possibility is tested by comparing the adaptations of English loanwords in 19th- and early 20th-century Quebec French, when bilinguals were few, to those of contemporary Quebec French, in which the rate of bilingualism is far higher. The results show that even when the proportion of bilinguals in a society is relatively small, they determine how loanwords are pronounced in the borrowing language. Bilinguals adapt loanwords on the basis of phonology, not of faulty perception of foreign sounds and structures. However, in a society where bilinguals are few, there is a slight increase in non-phonological influences in loanword adaptation. We address the small role played by non-phonological factors, including phonetic approximation, orthography, and analogy (true or false), showing that false analogy, in particular, may give the impression that phonetic approximation is more widespread in a loanword corpus than is actually the case.

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