Salience and similarity in loanword adaptation: A case study from Fijian

This paper analyzes the corpus of English loanwords into Fijian assembled by Schütz (1978) from the percpective of Optimality Theoretic faithfulness based on the notions of auditory salience and similarity (Steriade 2001a,b). Four topics are discussed: stress, consonant cluster resolution, variation in the form of the epenthetic vowel, and the adaptation of voiced stops. The adaptation of a loanword involves the resolution of often conflicting demands to preserve as much information from the source word as possible while still satisfying the constraints that make the lexical item sound like a word of the recipient language. Prince and Smolensky’s (1993) constraint-based Optimality Theory with its key notions of faithfulness and violable constraints is particularly well suited to model this aspect of linguistic competence. In adapting a foreign word the speaker is often faced with choices as to which information of the source to preserve and which to sacrifice. Recent study of this question suggests that auditory salience and similarity are critical factors in resolving the choice (Fleischacker 2000, Kenstowicz 2001, Steriade 2001a,b, Kang 2002, among others; see LaCharité and Paradis 2002 for a different perspective). The speaker will tend to preserve features whose absence would be most noticeable; and when a repair must b