The Adaptation of French Consonant Clusters in Vietnamese Phonology: An OT Account

Abstract

The phenomenon of phonological adaptation arises due to the segmental, phonotactic, supra-segmental, and morpho-phonological restrictions of the borrowing language. This paper specifically discusses the adaptation of French consonant clusters both in onset and coda positions when borrowed into Vietnamese in the framework of Optimality Theory. The primary objective of the current study is to examine how Vietnamese speakers select repair strategies such as epenthesis or deletion in modifying French words.

Syllable Structure and Word Stress in Central Kerala Konkani Variety: An OT Approach

“…Such repair strategies of epenthesis in loan word adaptation are also visible in the realm of loan word phonology. Epenthesis seems to be the preferred strategy to repair the onset clusters in many languages which is evident from the previous research such as Burmese (Chang 2009), Shona (Uffman 2006), Vietnamese (Nguyen & Dutta 2017), Japanese (Shoji & Shoji 2014), Persian (Ghorbanpour et al 2019). Such evidence of epenthesis adopted as repair strategy at a cross linguistic level strengthens the notion of phonological strength that tries to capture the predominance of certain phonological features and units in the world languages.…”

Segmental Features of Hong Kong English: A Contrastive Approach Study

“…This shows that CCM is a rather common feature in HKE and it is very likely the result of L1 transfer. In fact, this is a universal feature among second language users (Nguyen & Dutta 2017). Due to the absence of consonant clusters in Cantonese, HKE speakers will "tend to use deletion or epenthesis" (Chan & Li 2000: 81) in order to cope with consonant clusters in English.…”

The Typology of Pharyngealization in Arabic Dialects Focusing on a Rural Jordanian Variety

“…The faithfulness and markedness constraints at work in our analysis are given in (25) below. (For other recent work on Optimality Theory, see Omachonu 2008, Dutta 2012, Nguyen & Dutta 2017, and Ghorbanpour et al 2019 The constraint in (25a) is a faithfulness constraint that militates against any underlying emphatic surfacing as non-emphatic in the output (do not delete the [RTR] feature). The constraint in (25b) is also a faithfulness constraint that militates against any underlyingly non-emphatic segments surfacing as emphatic by way of spreading of [RTR] (do not add additional association lines linked to [RTR]).…”