Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Date/Time: 11 April (Wed), 5 pm
Location: 32D-831
Title: Epenthesis Positioning in Loan Adaptation: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology
In loan adaptation, vowel epenthesis frequently occurs as a repair, when a cluster of a source
language is phonotactically illegal in the borrowing language. The most notable previous finding
has been that the position of epenthetic vowels differs depending on the type of cluster; sonority-
rising clusters, especially stop-sonorant (TR), are more likely to be split by an epenthetic vowel
than sonority-falling clusters, especially sibilant-stop (ST), e.g., ‘plastic’ > [bilastik] (internal
epenthesis) vs. ‘study’ > [istadi] (external epenthesis) (Egyptian Arabic; Broselow 1992).This
study investigates epenthesis patterns in all possible types of clusters, both in word-initial and in
word-final positions, from a cross-linguistic survey of loanwords. From the results, I propose
new generalizations about the preferred site of epenthesis: (i) if a cluster contains an obstruent, a
vowel is epenthesized after the obstruent, e.g., camp > [kh?mph?] (Korean); (ii) if a cluster
contains a sonorant, a vowel is epenthesized before the sonorant, e.g., rubl (Russian) > [rub?l]
(Kirgiz).By focusing only on initial clusters (Gouskova 2003, Steriade 2006) or on ST and TR
clusters (Broselow 1992, Fleischhacker 2001, 2005), previous work has failed to identify the
current broad generalizations and cannot uniformly explain the cases where the epenthesis
patterns are different word-initially and word-finally, e.g., mnemonicheskij (Russ.) >
[ymnemonicheskij] ‘mnemonic’ (Kirghiz) with external epenthesis vs. gimn (Russian) > [gimun]
‘hymn’ (Kirghiz) with internal epenthesis. My hypothesis is that the typology results from
perceptual similarity between a consonant and its epenthesized form. Specifically, an obstruent is
perceptually more similar to an obstruent-vowel sequence than to a vowel-obstruent, and a
sonorant is perceptually more similar to a vowel-sonorant sequence than to a sonorant-vowel. I
will show relevant phonetic bases and experimental results supporting this hypothesis. Based on
this, the typology will be analyzed based on the P-map hypothesis (Steriade 2001/2009).