Stress placement in English loanwords by speakers of Mirpur Pahari in the UK

Stress placement in English loanwords into Mirpur Pahari (MP) is used to explore whether a usage-based approach can inform incorporation of external factors (e.g. exposure to a donor language - here, English) into formal phonological analysis of loanword adaptation alongside internal factors (e.g. phonology of the recipient language - here, MP). Stress placement in English loanwords into MP shows across- and within-speaker variation between conformity to MP stress rules (formalized in classical Optimality Theory) and retention of stress on the syllable that is stressed in English; this is a challenge for most theories of loanword adaptation. In our hybrid approach, variable adaptation patterns in individual speakers’ loanword realizations in production data from 12 MP speakers in the UK are correlated with degree of exposure to English operationalized as vocabulary size, and a unified formal account is sketched through usage-based weighting of constraints in Stochastic OT.