28.3269, Diss: Le affricate dentali nell'italiano di Bolzano. Un approccio sociofonetico

Wed Aug 2 15:45:11 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3269. Wed Aug 02 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3269, Diss: Le affricate dentali nell'italiano di Bolzano. Un approccio sociofonetico

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Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2017 11:45:00
From: Chiara Meluzzi [chiara.meluzzi at yahoo.it]
Subject: Le affricate dentali nell'italiano di Bolzano. Un approccio sociofonetico

Institution: Università di Pavia 
Program: Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2014 

Author: Chiara Meluzzi

Dissertation Title: Le affricate dentali nell'italiano di Bolzano. Un approccio 
sociofonetico 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
                     Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): Italian (ita)

Dissertation Director(s):
Alessandro Vietti
Silvia Dal Negro
Gabriele Iannaccaro
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Ada Valentini

Dissertation Abstract:

The title of my PhD thesis is “Le affricate dentali nell’italiano di Bolzano.
Un approccio sociofonetico” (Dental affricates in the Italian of Bozen. A
sociophonetic approach). It represents a very first enquiry on the Italian
variety spoken in Bozen (South Tyrol). The object of the research is very
peculiar from a sociolinguistic point of view: firstly, Italian speakers in
Bozen represents the majority linguistic group, whereas in South Tyrol the
most widespread language is German; secondly, Italian speakers came in Bozen
during the last century from different areas of Italy, thus resulting in a
lack of a common dialectal background.

It is interesting to note that no previous study has provided a data-driven
definition of the Italian spoken in Bozen, and the literature in this respect
is very poor and conflicting. For this reason, one of main purpose of this
thesis was the collection of a huge corpus of spoken Italian of Bozen, apt for
future researches. Then, a sociophonetic approach to the data was preferred,
since it allows to see the complex relations among different linguistic and
social variables, with the final aim of «identifying, and ultimately
explaining, the sources, loci, parameters, and communicative functions of
socially-structured variation in speech» (Foulkes et al. 2010: 704).

Our data consist of 42h 43’ recordings with 42 Italian speakers of different
ages, sexes, degrees of education and districts of residence. Each speaker was
engaged in a conversation with the researcher, in which it was elicited a more
semi-spontaneous variety of speech (cfr. Labov 1994). Then, speakers were
asked to read a long wordlist consisting of 310 isolated real words presented
in isolation on a computer screen, and finally to read 9 tongue-twisters.
Among the 310 words there were 68 instances of a dental affricate in different
phonological constraints. Each instance was then isolated, and annotated in
PRAAT following a specific annotation protocol which has been developed for
this analysis.

The analysis focused on three main linguistic parameters: sonority degree,
duration, and place of articulation. We tested the distribution of each
linguistic parameter.

The inspection of the spectrograms has revealed that it exists a sort of
intermediate degree between  voiced and voiceless dental affricates: in these
realizations, which we called intermediate, the occlusive part of the dental
affricate presents the typical sonority band, whereas sonority disappears in
the following fricative part. This ''mixed'' affricate has been shown to be
more frequent in the speech of old, ineducated people, in particularly women.

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