The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the reduction of unstressed vowels in Coratino, a language spoken in the Apulia region of Italy. Its vowel inventory includes seven vowels: /i, e, ε, a, ɔ, o, u/. All but /a/ are reduced to a schwa when they surface in unstressed positions. Furthermore, back and front vowels are not reduced in unstressed positions when they are adjacent to a labial consonant, or adjacent to a velar followed by a palatal. These vowels also remain non-reduced in word-initial position. Therefore, there are three contexts in which these vowels are not reduced (in stressed positions, adjacent to a consonant, and in word-initial positions). This article aims to reduce this disjunction.

Vowel reduction may involve phonetic reduction processes, with nonreached targets, and/or phonological processes in which a vowel target is changed for another target, possibly schwa. Coratino, a dialect of southern Italy, displays complex vowel reduction processes assumed to be phonological. We analyzed a corpus representative of vowel reduction in Coratino, based on a set of a hundred pairs of words contrasting a stressed and an unstressed version of a given vowel in a given consonant environment, produced by 10 speakers. We report vowelformants together with consonant-to-vowel formant trajectories and durations, and show that these data are rather in agreement with a change in vowel target from /i e ɛ·ɔ u/ to schwa when the vowel is a non-word-initial unstressed utterance, unless the vowel shares a place-of-articulation feature with the preceding or following consonant. Interestingly, it also appears that there are 2 targets for phonological reduction, differing in F1 values. A "higher schwa" - which could be considered as /ɨ/ - corresponds to reduction for high vowels /i u/ while a "lower schwa" - which could be considered as /ə/ - corresponds to reduction for midhigh.

Coratino is a dialect spoken in the region of Puglia, in which there is a process of vowel reduction: all unstressed vowels except /a/ are reduced to schwa. However, this reduction does not happen when a vowel is adjacent to a consonant that shares a melody element, such as palatality for front vowels and velarity or labiality for back vowels. In addition, the ATR property of the mid vowels alternates: stressed /ε,ɔ/ are realized as [e,o] in unstressed positions, and /o,ɔ/ surface as [u] only when the adjacent consonant is velar. The analysis of this alternation is based on a version of Element Theory, and also on the licensing constraints that on the one hand define the specific choice a language makes among the combinatory possibilities, and on the other hand play a role in defining the properties of the phonological processes in the language.