An Analysis of the Epenthesis in Chinese Loanwords of English Origin

Epenthesis is an important and popular repair strategy to realize consonants not followed by a vowel.There are two kinds of epenthesis in Chinese loanwords of English Origin,namely the insertion between consonant clusters and that at the consonantal coda.Taking the latter as the example,this paper discusses epenthesis within the theoretical frame of OT,analyzes the interrelated constraints and their arrangement,and concludes that for an epenthetic vowel,the schwa [i] is a favorite choice,the central vowel is quite popular,and [u] takes a second place.