Prosodic features of pragmatic <i>quello</i> in Informal Neapolitan Italian: data from real-world speech

Abstract

Due to contact with the local dialects, the informal varieties of Italian spoken in Campania feature a pragmatic use of the demonstrative pronoun quello, which can be used to double an argumental DP or as an expletive subject. The present paper investigates the prosodic properties of quello in a corpus collected by means of Pyrlato, a pipeline to extract data from YouTube. 1775 instances of quello have been collected, of which 248 were relevant for the analysis. The data show that pragmatic quello bears a pitch accent, unlike demonstrative determiner quello. Additionally, a prosodic boundary between pragmatic quello and the adjacent co-referent DP can be visually and/or auditorily detected, confirming the absence of an intonational contour arching over the two elements. Assuming that the results of our prosodic analysis of quello can be extended to its dialect equivalent chillo, we formulate a new hypothesis about the origin of pragmatic chillo/quello.