Salerno Italian

Intonational phonology and dimensions of variation

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.