A Phonological Analysis of Epenthesis in Chinese Loanword Adaptation

Epenthesis is a general and important repair strategy to deal with those forms which do not conform to the phonological pattern of the language it borrowed.Through analyzing a loanword corpora of 328 words,it finds that epenthesis is caused by syllable structure,phonotactics and duration of words.Epenthesis usually takes right side.As to the quality of epenthesis,the one resulting from local assimilation to the preceding consonants consists more than half of the total words,which is the main strategy of epenthesis./i,u/ do not have specification in the underlying form,the segment added shares one or more features with other segments.Adding // is another default strategy.To some extent,both strategies result from perception,illustrating Steriade's P-map Hypothesis and Salience and Similarity Theory do play an important role in loanword adaptation.