Varied adaptation patterns of English stops and fricatives in Korean loanwords: The influence of the P-map

Abstract

In order to investigate to what extent perceptual factors affect the borrowing process, we examined the borrowing of English obstruents in Korean by comparing loanword adaptation patterns with the natives P-map (Steriade, 2001b). The orthographic classification technique was used to obtain the P-map (e.g., Wiik, 1965; Schmidt, 1996); 40 native Koreans were asked to choose the best matching Korean sounds with Korean orthography after listening to English nonsense words consisting of the vowel /a/ and 10 English labial and coronal consonants /p b f v t d s z θ ð/ in three prosodic locations such as word onset, pre- and post-stressed intervocalic positions (e.g., /pa/, /ápa/, /apá/). A comparison of the results with loanwords suggests that the P-map, in general, guides the borrowing process although there exist some mismatches between the P-map and the loanword adaptation patterns. Based on the perceptual results, two P-map constraints are proposed: BeSimilar[voice] and BeSimilar[ConDur]. Then, Korean loanwords of English obstruents are analyzed as the interaction between the perceptually motivated constraints and non-perceptual constraints, i.e., Ident(place) and *Cont, under the Optimality Theoretical framework in order to capture the somewhat limited role of the P-map in loanword phonology.