Ukrainian Obstruent + Sonorant and Sonorant + Obstruent Consonant Clusters in Online Adaptation by Native Speakers of English
Ukrainian Obstruent + Sonorant and Sonorant + Obstruent Consonant Clusters in Online Adaptation by Native Speakers of English

Summary/Abstract: In the process of loanword adaptation words often undergo various changes in order to comply with the phonological system of the borrowing language. At the phonotactic level the most commonly applied modifications of alien consonant clusters include vowel insertion, consonant deletion and cluster modification. The present paper examines online adaptation of Ukrainian word-initial twoconsonant sequences of radically different segmental makeup and sonority relations, namely, obstruent + sonorant (e.g. /zm/, /vn/) and sonorant + obstruent (e.g. /rt/, /mʒ/), which are illicit in English, in order to establish the major phonological patterns of anglicization and account for them in the light of Optimality Theory.

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