Salience and similarity in loanword adaptation: a case study from Fijian

This paper analyzes the corpus of English loanwords into Fijian assembled by Schütz [Schütz, A., 1978. English loanwords in Fijian. In: Schütz, A. (Ed.), Fijian Language Studies: Borrowing and Pidginization. Bulletin of Fiji Museum No. 4, pp. 1–50] from the perspective of Optimality Theoretic faithfulness based on the notions of auditorysalience and similarity [Steraide, D., 2001. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: a perceptual account. In: Hume, E., Johnson, K. (Eds.), The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 219–250; Steraide, D., 2001. The Phonology of Perceptibility Effects: the P-map and its Consequences for Constraint Organization. Unpublished UCLA ms]. Four topics are discussed: stress, consonant cluster resolution, variation in the form of the epenthetic vowel, and the adaptation of voiced stops.