Salerno Italian: Intonational phonology and dimensions of variation

Riccardo Orrico; Renata Savy; Mariapaola D'Imperio

doi:10.17469/O2106AISV000018

Authors

Riccardo Orrico University of Salerno & Aix Marseille University, CNRS, LPL UMR 7309, Aix en Provence, France https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9260-7210
Renata Savy Department of Humanities Studies, University of Salerno
Mariapaola D'Imperio Rutgers University, Department of Linguistics and The Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), New Brunswick (NJ), USA https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5122-4555

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17469/O2106AISV000018

Keywords:

intonation, Salerno Italian, individual variability, AM theory

Abstract

Despite the large number of studies on the intonation of Italian varieties, research on Salerno Italian has been rather scarce and a detailed account of the main phonological patterns is still missing. The intonation analysis we report in this paper is framed within the Autosegmental-Metrical theory and the types of utterances we analyzed are taken from a corpus of both read and semi-spontaneous speech. The study adds to the literature on Italian intonation not only in dealing with an under-described variety, but also by going beyond the common consideration of tunes as stable expressions of pragmatic meanings within a linguistic community. Considerable emphasis is here placed on variety-internal variation with data showing that individual variability in the use of intonation cannot be simply dismissed, but needs to be properly addressed.