Vowel elision in spoken Italian
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Luigia Garrapa
Abstract
Italian vowel elision across word boundaries has been considered obligatory with the masculine singular determiners uno ‘a/an’, lo ‘the’ and quello ‘that’ in prevocalic context, but as unpredictable and subject to variation with the other function words. I will show that, in Florentine Italian, vowel elision is a morphologically driven phonological process which crucially depends on two factors: the morphological features realised by the word-final vowels together with the possibility of recovering them from the context after the application of vowel elision, as well as the function word type and its frequency of occurrence.
Abstract
Italian vowel elision across word boundaries has been considered obligatory with the masculine singular determiners uno ‘a/an’, lo ‘the’ and quello ‘that’ in prevocalic context, but as unpredictable and subject to variation with the other function words. I will show that, in Florentine Italian, vowel elision is a morphologically driven phonological process which crucially depends on two factors: the morphological features realised by the word-final vowels together with the possibility of recovering them from the context after the application of vowel elision, as well as the function word type and its frequency of occurrence.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- Unpronounced MUCH and the distribution of degree expressions in Spanish 1
- The status of the (supposed) expletive in Brazilian Portuguese existential clauses 17
- On the linearization of adjectives in Romanian 33
- Prepositionless genitive and N+N compounding in (Old) French and Italian 53
- Vowel elision in spoken Italian 73
- Acoustic correlates of phonological microvariations 89
- Romance lenition 111
- Main stress in Italian nonce nouns 127
- Negative concord as feature sharing 143
- Appositive sentences and the structure(s) of coordination 159
- Cleaving the interactions between sluicing and P-stranding 175
- Another look at wh-questions in Romance 199
- Index of subjects and terms 259
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- Unpronounced MUCH and the distribution of degree expressions in Spanish 1
- The status of the (supposed) expletive in Brazilian Portuguese existential clauses 17
- On the linearization of adjectives in Romanian 33
- Prepositionless genitive and N+N compounding in (Old) French and Italian 53
- Vowel elision in spoken Italian 73
- Acoustic correlates of phonological microvariations 89
- Romance lenition 111
- Main stress in Italian nonce nouns 127
- Negative concord as feature sharing 143
- Appositive sentences and the structure(s) of coordination 159
- Cleaving the interactions between sluicing and P-stranding 175
- Another look at wh-questions in Romance 199
- Index of subjects and terms 259
