Loanword Formation: A Neural Network Approach

Loanword phonology seeks to model the process by which foreign words are `nativised' or incorporated into the phonological system of the `borrowing' language. We can conceive of this as a parsing of the phonetic input provided by the foreign word forms, in accordance with phonological output constraints of the borrowing language. Following Silverman (1992) we conceive loanword formation as fundamentally a twostage process: the first of which yields a parsing of the phonetic input into segmentally organised phonetic feature bundles, interpretable as segmental targets in the borrowing language. In the second stage of processing, these segmental targets are parsed into phonological structures (syllables, mora, feet...etc) compatible with the word-prosody of the borrowing language. Japanese borrowings from English provide a good test-bed for models of loanword formation, because examples are abundant and, while the segmental mapping from English to Japanese is relatively straightforward, ..