L'organizzazione temporale delle geminate dell’italiano: uno studio di modellizzazione tramite la Fonologia Articolatoria

Abstract

Italian geminates are still a matter of debate about their phonological status and temporal organization with adjacent vowels. Although kinematic analyses can clarify what strategies are used to achieve length contrast, articulatory studies on Italian are scarce. The present work adopts the theoretical and methodological approach of Articulatory Phonology (Browman, Goldstein, 1989) to investigate the articulatory mechanisms involved in the gestural organization of Italian geminates, relying on the data of temporal intervals of consonantal versus vowel gestures, interpreted according to Gafos' (2002) formalization. The main objective is to test two alternative models of gestural synchronization, the “Combined Vowel and Consonant”, proposed by Articulatory Phonology, and the “Vowel-to-Vowel”, proposed by Öhman (1967). For this purpose, a “virtual geminate” was constructed by doubling the articulatory closure interval derived from the singleton and superimposing it on some contextual vowel landmarks (Gafos, 2002). The results of the different synchronizations of the virtual geminate according to the two models are then be compared with those of the real geminate.