A Phonological Analysis of English Loanwords in Mirpur Pahari: Exploring Variable Adaptation in Optimality Theory

Loanwords are a typical by-product of a language contact situation. In the realm of
loanword phonology many studies have captured phonological variation using Optimality
Theory (OT) as a framework (Yip, 1993; Jacobs&Gussenhoven, 2000; Ito &Mester, 1995;
Davidson&Noyer1996; Broselow, 2004; Kenstowicz& Atiwong, 2006, inter alia). Other
studies have focused on phonological variation within and among the speakers of the same
speechcommunity(ordialect)byusingOT(Anttila,1995,1997;Anttila&Cho,1998;Auger2001;
Nagy&Reynolds,1997;Zubritskaya,1997).However, few of these studies have either
modelled phonological variation in loanword adaptation patterns at the suprasegmental level
(involving syllable phonotactics or stress) using OT or exploited the possibilities that OT
offers for exploring the factorial typology of variation in loanword adaptation, to predict
possible loanword grammars.
The current study focuses on loanword adaptation patterns from English into Mirpur
Pahari (MP) based on generalisations derived from native speaker intuitions (for speakers in
Pakistan) and elicited data (for a UK-speaker).The adaptation patterns at suprasegmental
level in MP loanwords are found to undergo different modifications in different MP speaker
groups (namely, Monolinguals (ML),Late-bilingual(LB) and Early-bilingual(EB));–some
adaptations reflect aspects of MP phonology, but others have no correlate in MP phonology.
The central tenet of this thesis is that variations in loanword adaptation patterns can by
modelled by using OT (Prince and Smolensky,1993/2004) as a main framework.I argue that
OT can be used to analyse inter-speaker variation in loanwords by reranking
constraints.Intra-speaker variation can be captured by using Partially Ordered Constraints
(POC) as proposed by Anttila (1997).A factorial typology analysis of the range of MP
loanwords grammars is presented using OTSoft, as a by-product of checking constraint
rankings.The factorial typology strongly suggests an influence of orthography in
constraining variation in loanword adaptation.Overall,this thesis demonstrates that
investigation of loanword adaptation in a complex language context situation-like that of
MP- must take both internal and external factors into account.