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Units of speech production in Italian

  • Irene Vogel and Linda Wheeldon
View more publications by John Benjamins Publishing Company
Romance Linguistics 2009
This chapter is in the book Romance Linguistics 2009

Abstract

When speakers produce a prepared utterance, the amount of time required to initiate the utterance reflects the number of units in the utterance. In this paper, we investigate the nature of this unit on the basis of Italian experimental data, and compare our findings to previous studies of Dutch. We demonstrate that thwe findings for Italian and Dutch are essentially the same, despite substantial prosodic differences between Romance and Germanic languages. It is shown that in order to account for these findings, a prosodic unit between the Phonological Word and the Phonological Phrase is needed. Two possibilities are considered, a recursive Phonological Word and a more recently proposed constituent, the Composite Group.

Abstract

When speakers produce a prepared utterance, the amount of time required to initiate the utterance reflects the number of units in the utterance. In this paper, we investigate the nature of this unit on the basis of Italian experimental data, and compare our findings to previous studies of Dutch. We demonstrate that thwe findings for Italian and Dutch are essentially the same, despite substantial prosodic differences between Romance and Germanic languages. It is shown that in order to account for these findings, a prosodic unit between the Phonological Word and the Phonological Phrase is needed. Two possibilities are considered, a recursive Phonological Word and a more recently proposed constituent, the Composite Group.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword & acknowledgements ix
  4. List of contributors xi
  5. Editors’ introduction 1
  6. Part I. Phonetics/Phonology
  7. Correcting the record on Dominican [s]-hypercorrection 15
  8. V-to-V assimilation in trisyllabic words in French 25
  9. The production and provenance of palatal nasals in Portuguese and Spanish 43
  10. Lenition and phonemic contrast in Majorcan Catalan 63
  11. Alveolar laterals in Majorcan Spanish 81
  12. Units of speech production in Italian 95
  13. Pitch polarity in Palenquero 111
  14. Word-minimality and sound change in Hispano-Romance 129
  15. Multiple opacity in Eastern Regional French 153
  16. Part II. Syntax
  17. Syntactic variation in Colombian Spanish 169
  18. Anaphoricity, logophoricity and intensification 187
  19. More on the clitic combination puzzle 203
  20. The Spanish dative alternation revisited 217
  21. Romanian genderless pronouns and parasitic gaps 231
  22. To agree or not to agree 249
  23. Variation in subject expression in Western Romance 267
  24. A phase-based analysis of Old French genitive constructions 285
  25. V2 loss in Old French and Old Occitan 301
  26. Part III. Morphology, and interfaces
  27. The loss and survival of inflectional morphology 323
  28. Allomorphy in pre-clitic imperatives in Formenteran Catalan 337
  29. Preverbal vowels in wh-questions and declarative sentences in Northern Italian Piacentine dialects 353
  30. Pitch accent, focus, and the interpretation of non- wh exclamatives in French 369
  31. Detours along the perfect path 387
  32. Grammaticalization of commencer/cominciare “to begin” in French and Italian 405
  33. Index of subjects, terms and languages 423
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