Prolongation in Italian

Abstract

This study follows the framework set by the strand of corpus studies aimed at investigating and unveiling the role of prolongations as linguistic elements by comparing their use in different languages, ranging from Germanic languages (Swedish, American English, German) to Tok Pisin, Chinese Mandarin, Hungarian and Hebrew, and provides evidence on the use of prolongation in a Romance language, namely Italian. The analysis is conducted on different speech styles, i.e., descriptive informal dialogic speech as well as informative monologic speech, and concerns the distributional characterisations of prolongation phenomena, their segmental and durational traits also considering the comparison with another type of voiced speech management phenomena, that is non-verbal vocalisations. The main results show that in the considered Italian data speakers use prolongations more frequently than non-verbal vocalisations and the latter are generally longer, which argues for the fact that these two voiced phenomena are differently involved in speech management. Then, the distributional and segmental features of prolongations in Italian as compared to other languages support the idea that prolongations, as linguistic elements, are subjected, to a certain extent, to the phonotactic constraints of languages. 1