Tutorial overview: Suprasegmental adaptation in loanwords

The current paper provides a survey of current studies on the adaptation of suprasegmentals, i.e., tone, pitch accent, and stress. Tone and pitch accent languages have a relatively free distribution of prominence and in principle could preserve the prominence of the input language without contradicting native restrictions. While many languages exhibit the faithful preservation of input prominence as expected, a number of tone and pitch accent languages, all of them East Asian languages, ignore the input language prominence partially, or even completely, and instead assign tones or pitch accents based on default assignment mechanisms. Stress languages, on the other hand, have stricter restrictions on the location of prominence and it is often impossible to faithfully preserve input language prominence in the original position. In a group of languages, the original stress position is ignored and stress is assigned based on the native metrical rules and the segmental composition of the input words, whereas others employ segmental deletion or vowel lengthening to bring the original stressed syllable into the appropriate position with respect to native metrical rules. It is suggested that the divergence in repair strategies may partly be due to the different combination of acoustic cues utilized to signal prominence in different languages, and it is also suggested that all else being equal, the faithful preservation of the input language prominence, by way of segmental alteration or by way of importation, is more likely to occur when the language contact is more direct and intimate than not.