Syllable Structure Adaptation of English Loanwords in Mosuli Arabic
Abstract
Loanwords are lexical words where both form and meaning are borrowed with some adaptation to the phonological system of the new language. English loanwords borrowed into Mosuli Arabic are characterized by having foreign syllable structures and as such are considered as ill-formed and need to be repaired, and second, there are limited steps, maximally two, in the repair process, if more steps are needed, the deletion of the ill-formed structure will be the result.The adopted model in this research is the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (TCRS). The data in this study consist of 500 transcribed productions (tokens) of English loanwords from the audio recordings of 20 Mosuli Arabic informants and are analysed in accordance with the above model. The findings show that English loan words borrowed into Mosuli Arabic are either repaired by vowel insertion or consonant deletion accordingly in agreement with the syllable structure of Mosuli Arabic. The repair in both cases does not exceed two steps and accordingly it is in consonance with the predictions of the TCRS..