A new interdisciplinary approach to loanword phonology: the Salience and Dominance Model, SOAS

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• published: 23 Mar 2016
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Find out more about SOAS Linguistics at http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics This Linguistics seminar titled "A new interdisciplinary approach to loanword phonology: the Salience and Dominance Model" was given by Memet Aktürk Drake (Stockholm University) at SOAS University of London on 10 November 2015. More about this event at https://goo.gl/CiSFSB I introduced the Salience and Dominance Model in my PhD dissertation at Stockholm University in February 2015. This model constitutes a more comprehensive approach to loanword phonology than previous ones in the literature. On the one hand, this is owing to the fact that the model combines insights from several disciplines such as phonetics, phonology, second-language acquisition, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language contact and language change. On the other, the model’s scope is greater as it aims to account for both the phonological adaptation (i.e. alterations to fit the receiving language) and adoption (i.e. preservation of original structures from the donor language) of loanwords. The model has hitherto been applied to cases of bilingual borrowing and bilingually-mediated monolingual borrowing in three papers: Aktürk-Drake 2011, 2014 and under review. I argue that the most important factors in bilingual borrowing are the perceptual salience of the donor-language structure and the language dominance of the bilingual borrower/user who is doing the borrowing. I will examplify the model inter alia with data from borrowings in Turkish from such languages as Arabic, French, English and Swedish. Furthermore, I will compare my approach with Thomason’s (2001) well-known borrowing scale with regard to explaining contact-induced phonological change. References Aktürk-Drake, Memet. (under review) Adoption in loanword phonology: Looking beyond linguistic competence. Aktürk-Drake, Memet. (2015). Phonological Adoption through Bilingual Borrowing – Comparing Elite Bilinguals and Heritage Bilinguals. Dissertations in Bilingualism No. 24. Stockholm University. Aktürk-Drake, M. (2014). The role of perceptual salience in bilingual speakers’ integration of illicit long segments in loanwords. Lingua, 143, 162−186. Aktürk-Drake, Memet (2011). Phonological and sociolinguistic factors in the integration of /l/ in Turkish in borrowings from Arabic and Swedish. Turkic Languages 14, 153-191. Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language contact. An introduction. Washington, D.C.:Georgetown University Press.