Marginal contrasts in Tongan loanword phonology

Monday, 13 September 2010, Colloquium

Kie Zuraw, UCLA
joint work with Kathleen O’Flynn and Kaeli Ward

Abstract

Stress is normally predictable in Tongan. However, data from consultation with three Tongan speakers shows that secondary stress in loans is influenced by whether vowels in the loan correspond to a stressed vowel in the English source word, to an unstressed vowel, or to nothing (are etymologically epenthetic).

Similarly, Tongan phonotactics normally forbid consonant clusters in careful speech, but allow some to result through variable vowel deletion. In our corpus of loans, vowel deletion is influenced by whether the vowel is etymologically epenthetic.

This means that Tongan speakers must be able to perceive certain contrasts that fall outside of L1, and encode them in representations of loanwords. We discuss this finding in light of recent research on L2 perception and loan adaptation (e.g., Peperkamp 2004).

We also consider how these loan-only contrasts could be encoded in lexical entries. Treating certain loans as pseudocompounds is attractive (see Schütz 2001), but runs into problems with long vowels and does not address vowel deletion. It seems instead that some lexical entries must include this otherwise non-contrastive information. In addition, the information must be encoded at the level of the segment rather than at the level of the entire morpheme, narrowing down the theories of lexical exceptionality that could work for this case.

Works cited in abstract:

Peperkamp, Sharon. 2004. Lexical exceptions in stress systems: arguments from early language acquisition and adult speech perception. Language 80. 98-126.

Schütz, Albert J. 2001. Tongan accent. Oceanic Linguistics 40(2). 307-323.