| Abstract |
The main focus in this paper is to analyze the tonal phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin-Chinese loanwords, in the Optimality-Theoretical framework. Firstly, we set up a corpus of loanwords and observe the mapping between stress and tone. Tone is obligatory in Chinese grammatical words. Every loanword must have a tone. However the source language, such as English has stress, instead of tone. The loanword data show that the high tone is preferred to map the stress unit, and the unstressed unit is not preferred to map a high tone. The proposal for analyzing the tonal phenomena in loanwords is that the prominent unit in every language must be parsed in the surface forms. The prominent unit in English is realized as a stressed syllable. Tone is a phonological unit to be parsed in Chinese loanwords. The decision of tones of Mandarin-Chinese loanwords is proposed to be according to the ranking of relevant constraints such as FAITH-PROMINENCE, Tone-Obligatory, *PROMINENCE/L, *PROMINENCE/M, *PROMINENCE/H. Moreover, some part of loanword data show that the stressed unit is realized as a non-high tone and the unstressed unit as a high tone. The part of data would be proposed as to be lack of common or suitable writing characters and not to violate Mandarin phonotactic constraints.
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