Conservatività come caratteristica fonologica in sincronia: geminazione preconsonantica in italiano meridionale

Abstract

Italian is a "conservative" language, mostly from a synchronic phonetic and phonological point of view. The conservatism of Italian phonology is most prominent in southern varieties, and it is well analysable through the phenomenon of preconsonantal stopgemination. In this paper I analyse the pronunciation of eleven Italian informants who read sample-phrases with stop + consonant clusters. I claim that Southern Italians usually geminate the first segment of the ill-formed cluster. This gemination process is due to the conservatism of Southern Italian phonology, which requires epenthetic processes rather than deletion or lenition, targeting the conservation of each element of the input form.