Project

Intonation and rhythm of dialects and Italian: the case of Campania

Code
3G010122
Duration
01 January 2022 → 31 December 2025
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Promotor-spokesperson
Research disciplines
  • Humanities
    • Dialectology
    • Laboratory phonetics and speech science
    • Phonetics and phonology
    • Sociolinguistics
Keywords
intonatio & rhythm neighboring varieties Campania dialects Prosody regional Italian
 
Project description

Regional pronunciations can result from the phonological contact between a standard language and its dialectal substrate. Such pronunciations might be less diversified compared to their substrate dialects, since regional varieties are spoken in larger areas than the dialects. Despite the importance of prosody in the identification of the speaker’s regional origin, we know little about how dialectal prosody is reflected in regional pronunciation, and we know even less about how dialectal prosody varies in a given geographic area compared to the prosody of the regional varieties of the national language spoken in the same area. This project addresses these issues by focusing on the case of four Campania varieties: Neapolitan and upper Cilento Italian, and Neapolitan and upper Cilento dialect. The project aims at (1) analyzing the prosodic systems of the two dialects, (2) comparing each dialect and the corresponding regional Italian variety, and (3) making a comparison between the two dialects, and between the two regional Italian varieties. We investigate the prosody of these varieties with a novel methodology integrating rhythm and intonation analyses, and relying on different types of speech (read, scripted, dialogical). The project makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the phonology of dialects and the relationship between dialectal continuum and regional varieties in Italy, and contributes theoretically and methodologically to Autosegmental-Metrical phonology.