Tone Adaptation from Mandarin to Nuosu Yi

This study investigates tone adaptation in Nuosu Yi loanwords from Chengdu Mandarin, focusing on how native tonal phonology shapes suprasegmental adaptation under long-term contact. While previous research emphasizes perceptual similarity or faithfulness to source prominence in tone mapping (e.g., Silverman 1992; Kang 2010), these models do not explain the skewed tone distribution found in the Nuosu Yi loanword lexicon: low tone 21 is overwhelmingly preferred, while high tones 44 and 55 are consistently dispreferred. Using a corpus of loanwords and a Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model, this study evaluates the influence of markedness and faithfulness constraints. The results show that markedness against disfavoring high tones is significantly amplified in Nuosu Yi loanword phonology, even when faithfulness is not violated. These findings challenge the assumption that tone adaptation reliably preserves source similarity, even in cases of close and sustained language contact. Instead, they point to the dominant role of native phonological markedness, with implications for theories of suprasegmental adaptation and phonological modeling. This study also contributes empirical data from Nuosu Yi, a tonal language underrepresented in loanword phonology research.