[...]... violation of the Markedness constraint ∗ Coda To avoid violation of Onset, a grammar could add a consonant to the left of the vowel or delete the vowel, getting rid of the offending syllable GEN provides these options in the form of candidates The violation of ∗ Coda could likewise be avoided by deletion of the nasal or by insertion of a vowel to the right of the nasal Since in Italian neither of these... language of Latin In this chapter I give a sketch of the origins of Italian, concentrating on the main changes to the phonological system that characterize the change from Classical Latin to Modern Italian Nevertheless, I start with a short sketch of the emergence of fifteenth-century Florentine as the source variety for Modern Italian The history of Italian and its rise to the status of the language of Italy... use the concept of the syllable as well as moraic theory and the prosodic hierarchy as assumed in the framework of prosodic phonology (Nespor and Vogel 1986) As indicated in the previous section, the phenomena of intervocalic s-voicing and raddoppiamento sintattico reveal the fundamental problem of a project on the phonology of Italian The study of variation has to be an integral part of an account of. .. INTRODUCTION The Phonology of Italian offers an overview of the main characteristics of Italian sound patterns under consideration of regional variation and an analysis couched in the framework of Optimality Theory With regard to this goal immediately two questions arise 1 What is Italian? 2 Why is there a need for such a book? The first question might be raised by readers who are aware of the complex... phonology is very well studied, our understanding of the phonology of Italian as a system is still very poor One aim of this book is to put the pieces of this puzzle together In the following chapters I will not, however, exhaustively discuss the various accounts given of the manifold issues in Italian phonology, but will rather attempt to give a unified picture of the language Apart from referring to previous... places adopting them, I will develop an account of the main aspects of the phonology of Italian in Optimality Theory Optimality Theory is a framework that is extremely well designed to analyse processes and variation It does not provide a theory of representations In this book, the segmental phonology is analysed in a version of the Parallel Structures Model (Morén 2003; 2006) The analyses of prosodic... has gained ground at the cost of the dialects The number of families using some form of the standard at home has been steadily increasing Today, over 90 per cent of Italians use some form of the standard in some contexts The majority of speakers, even those who are not bilingual and don’t have any active command of a dialect, use a regionally ‘coloured’ version of Italian (see also the discussion in Bertinetto... bring the theory closer to the psychological reality The investigation of these latter three types of variation has come more and more into focus over the past few years I regard the study of these types of variation— along with investigation of the earlier mentioned types—as important avenues on our way to a better understanding of language, and will spend some time in this book on their exploration The. .. based on the SPE framework Saltarelli (1970) is the most prominent example of the latter The issues it concentrates on are still essential in the contemporary discussion, and it provides brilliant analyses reflecting the state of generative phonology in the late 1960s The shortcomings of this outstanding contribution are its very economical use of language data and the high degree of abstractness in the. .. passing in Chapter 3 The order of Chapters 4 to 7 reflects the levels of phonological organization, building up from the level of the segment, through syllable structure, to foot structure and the organization of the phonological word, and moving beyond this to the phrasal level The third chapter provides the historical linguistic background of Italian by pointing to its roots in Latin and the major developments . alt="" The Phonology of Italian The Phonology of the World’s Languages General Editor: Jacques Durand Published The Phonology of Danish Hans Basbøll The Phonology of Dutch Geert Booij The Phonology. Tamil Prathima Christdas The Phonology of Japanese Laurence Labrune The Phonology of Spanish Iggy Roca The Phonology of Swedish Tomas Riad The Phonology of Washo Alan C. L. Yu THE PHONOLOGY OF ITALIAN Martin. Phonology of Standard Chinese, second edition San Duanmu The Phonology of Polish Edmund Gussmann The Phonology of English Michael Hammond The Phonology of Italian Martin Krämer The Phonology of Norwegian Gjert