Comparing prosody of Italian varieties and dialects: data from Neapolitan

Abstract

The paper provides a preliminary, qualitative examination of the prosody of Neapolitan dialect (ND) as it relates to Neapolitan Italian variety (NI). Taking NI as baseline for comparison, ND data seem characterized by several phoneticphonological strategies to enhance prosodic prominence, suggesting that phonetic parameters have a larger and more dynamic range of variation in ND than in NI. The data also highlight the interlacement between rhythmic, metric, and intonational facts, and the importance of sociolinguistic factors in shaping prosody. In particular, the larger variability of phonetic parameters observed in ND is likely to index dialectal speech as socially marked. We identify several prosodic discrepancies between ND and NI involving gradient features and tonal organization that call for further investigation. Future studies need to examine such differences in relation to sociolinguistic factors and consider the range of prosodic variation between Italian varieties and dialects spontaneously used by less linguistically-informed speaker. To strongly support our proposal, a larger sample of speakers is required.

The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary types. The prosodic system of questions in spoken Italian and French according to Language into Act Theory

“…Research on task-oriented speech corpora was run on the CLIPS corpus, which collects Map Task dialogues (Anderson et al, 1991) across the main Italian regional varieties. In Crocco (2006), the prosodic features and a fine-grained pragmatic analysis of Y/N questions have been annotated according to the HCRC Map task coding scheme, where Y/N questions are considered Dialogue moves which vary according to their informational value. However, the expression of the different nuances of meaning conveyed by prosodic contours appears fragmented, depending on various aspects (linguistic filling, interaction, and context).…”