The sociophonetics of rhotic variation in Sicilian dialects and Sicilian Italian: corpus, methodology and first results

Abstract

Citation / Cómo citar este artículo: Celata, C., Meluzzi, C. and Ricci, I. (2016 ABSTRACT: SoPhISM (The SocioPhonetics of verbal Interaction: Sicilian Multimodal corpus) is an acoustic and articulatory sociophonetic corpus focused on whithin-speaker variation as a function of stylistic/communicative factors. The corpus is particularly intended for the study of rhotics as a sociolinguistic variable in the production of Sicilian speakers. Rhotics are analyzed according to the distinction between single-phase and multiple-phase rhotics along with the presence of constriction and aperture articulatory phases. Based on these parameters, the annotation protocol seeks to classify rhotic variants within a sufficiently granular, but internally consistent, phonetic perspective. The proposed descriptive parameters allow for the discussion of atypical realizations in terms of phonetic derivations (or simplifications) of typical closure-aperture sequences. The distribution of fricative variants in the speech repertoire of one speaker and his interlocutors shows the potential provided by SoPhISM for sociophonetic variation to be studied at the 'micro' level of individual speaker's idiolects.Keywords: rhotics; articulatory sociophonetics; phonetic annotation; coda /r/; Sicilian. RESUMEN: Sociofonética de la variación de las róticas en los dialectos sicilianos y en el italiano deSicilia: corpus, metodología y primeros resultados.-SoPhISM (SocioPhonetics of verbal Interaction: Sicilian Multimodal corpus) es un corpus sociofonético acústico y articulatorio centrado en la variación individual en función de la variedad de la lengua y de los factores estilísticos y comunicativos del habla. El corpus está concebido particularmente para el estudio de /r/ en cuanto variable sociolingüística en el habla italiana y dialectal de locutores sicilianos. Las róticas se analizan teniendo en cuenta la distinción entre monofásicas y multifásicas, y la presencia de fases de constricción y abertura. Sobre la base de estos parámetros, el protocolo de anotación intenta clasificar las variantes dentro de una perspectiva fonética suficientemente minuciosa y, al mismo tiempo, internamente coherente. Los parámetros descriptivos propuestos permiten discutir ciertas realizaciones atípicas como derivaciones fonéticas (o simplificaciones) de secuencias típicas de cierre-apertura. La distribución de las variantes fricativas en el repertorio de un hablante y de sus interlocutores muestra el potencial proporcionado por SoPhISM para el estudio de la variación sociofonética en el nivel "micro" de los idiolectos.Palabras clave: róticas; sociofonética articulatoria; anotación fonética; /r/ en coda; siciliano.

Prosodically-Conditioned Variation: Rhotics in Brazilian Veneto

“…Nodari and Meluzzi (2020) also point out that Italian rhotics may be produced in various ways; that is, in addition to trills and taps, they may be produced as approximants, fricatives or combinations between a trill or tap and a fricative appendix. This range of possible rhotic variants had also been previously identified for different varieties of Italian, for other languages of Italy (namely, Sicilian; see Celata et al, 2016;Celata et al, 2019), as well as for some varieties of Spanish (Lipski, 1994;Willis, 2006).…”

Style and addressees interlocutor in the selection of dialectal vs. standard phonetic forms: Sicilian rhotics

“…The data for this study comes from the SoPhISM corpus (SocioPhonetics of speech Interaction: Sicilian, Multimodal corpus, cf. Celata, Meluzzi, & Ricci, 2016). SoPhISM is an acoustic and articulatory sociophonetic corpus documenting several speech varieties and styles produced by fluently 'bilingual' Sicilian-Italian speakers under the age of 30 from central and southern areas.…”

“…The rhotic variants were identified through visual inspection of waveforms and spectrograms. They were annotated and analysed according to the protocol developed in Celata, Vietti, & Spreafico (2019); details on how the annotation system was implemented in the SoPHISM corpus as well as on the phonetic variants that were found in the corpus are in Celata et al (2016). Basically, for each rhotic sound 'constrictions' and 'apertures' are identified.…”

“…As discussed with details in Celata et al (2016), the most frequent phonetic variants that were found in the corpus where apical trills [rː], apical taps [ɾ], postalveolar fricatives [ʐː], two-constriction tap-fricative variants or spirantized rhotics [ɾɹ̝], and alveolar approximants [ɹ]. In what follows, we analyse the percentage of occurrence of these variants in each relevant subset of the corpus, as defined by the three factors of language, style and (for dialogues) familiarity with the interlocutor.…”

“…In what follows, we analyse the percentage of occurrence of these variants in each relevant subset of the corpus, as defined by the three factors of language, style and (for dialogues) familiarity with the interlocutor. Spirantized rhotics where collapsed with postalveolar fricatives into a single category of fricative realizations; as a matter of fact, in spite of being articulatorily different and representing two potentially different stages of the sound change involving canonical constriction-aperture rhotics (Celata et al, 2016), these two variants are likely to be perceptually almost undistinguishable. We first analysed the production of the target speaker across languages (Italian and Sicilian dialect), pooling together the data for singletons and geminates.…”