The Phonology of English Loanwords in German : A Corpus-Based Study

Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich Englisch - Pdagogik, Didaktik, Sprachwissenschaft, Note: 1,0, Justus-Liebig-Universitt Gieen (Institut fr Englische Sprachwissenschaft), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Can you think of an English loanword in German that originally contains the sounds // or //? No? One might now spiteful say: luckily not! Jumping on the clich that Germans are not able to pronounce the th-sounds properly, this saves us a lot of acoustic mishaps. Yet, meanwhile there do exist a few loanwords containing the apico- dental fricatives // or //, as for example smoothie /'smui/ or thriller /'rl/. Still their proportion out of the total amount of English loans in German is vanishingly small. Bringing it to linguistic terms, these phonemes exclusively belong to the English phoneme inventory and do not constitute part of the German language system. Therefore the research question of this thesis is: Do phonological features influence the borrowing of a foreign word? There are a lot of reasons for the adaptation of loanwords and many works in linguistics deal with them in great detail (cf. for example Holland 2007: 49ff; Fischer 2008: 1ff). Speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The reasons for such lexical gaps vary greatly: cultural innovation may introduce objects or actions that do not have a name in the native language; native words may be perceived as non-prestigious; names of foreign cities, institutions, and political figures which were once unknown may have entered the public eye; new words may be introduced for play, etc. (Calabrese and Wetzels 2009b: 1) Most discussions about the factors that influence the occurrence of a loanword go back to syntactic, lexical, semantic or social circumstances (cf. Fischer 2008: 1f). Having browsed many books about English loanwords, only few of them explicitly mentioned phonological features when talking about parameters determining the appearance