Rhythmic Structure in Italian Noun Phrases: A Study on Vowel Durations

Abstract

This study deals with the temporal structure of 4- and 5-syllable noun phrases of one and of two constituents, produced as syntactic objects of Italian VP + NP sentences by 3 subjects. On the basis that vowel durational relations can reflect prominence relations, as previous data on Italian indicate, the study compares the durations of stressed vowels, vowels carrying secondary stress in compound words, and unstressed vowels in order to assess the effects of position within a phrase and to identify the rhythmic principles that regulate prominence relations among both stressed and unstressed vowels. The data indicate that the degree of prominence decreases from stressed vowels in phrase-final words to stressed vowels in non-final words, to rhythmically accented unstressed, to unaccented unstressed vowels. Vowels with secondary stress in compounds do not differ in duration from unstressed vowels. A remarkable finding is the very restricted range of variation of unstressed vowels. The data suggest that, although the rhythmic alternation rule in Italian disfavours adjacency and even proximity of two equally strong syllables, it does not disfavour sequences of two, three, four equally weak syllables. Sequences of unstressed vowels of nearly equal durations are also favoured by the absence of word boundary lengthening observed in the reiterant versions of our corpus. It is argued that the temporal organization of noun phrases that emerged from this investigation contributes to the perception of Italian as a syllable-timed language.

The phonetics of stress in Greek

“…Second, the present data indicate that Greek does not use lengthening to mark the end of prosodic words: in Experiment 2, which did not include stress clashes, only one out of five speakers, VK, showed word-final lengthening. The absence of final lengthening in Experiment 2 agrees with results reported in Dauer (1980a) and Botinis (1989), while similar results have also been reported for Italian (Farnetani & Kori 1990). In contrast, as mentioned in 2.3, evidence for word-final lengthening is very robust in several languages, such as English (e.g.…”

“…Experiments on languages other than English corroborate this understanding of the correlates of stress. For instance, Bertinetto (1980) and Farnetani & Kori (1990) conclude that in Italian duration and amplitude are more robust acoustic and perceptual cues of stress than vowel quality. Duration is a robust stress cue in Arabic as well, while vowel quality differences between stressed and unstressed vowels are small and inconsistent (de Jong & Zawaydeh 1999).…”

Italian intonation: An overview and some questions

“…The use of duration as a stress cue, both in production (Farnetani and Kori 1990;Marotta 1985) and perception (Bertinetto 1980;D'Imperio 2000a) can be compared to the role of the lax/tense vowel op-position which characterizes the Þrst level of the stress hierarchy proposed for English (Beckman and Edwards 1994;Beckman 1996). Stressed syllables are generally penultimate (Lepschy and Lepschy 1977;D'Imperio and Rosenthall 1999), though antepenultimate, Þnal and preantepenultimate stress can also be found.…”

Rhythm is in the mind of the beholder. Remarks on the nature of linguistic rhythm

“…For instance, two Turkic languages, Uzbek and Turkish, belong to stress-timed and syllable-timed classes, respectively (Sjoberg 1963, Lewis 1967. Similarly, in Italian and Portuguese, a pair of two Romance languages with comparable syllable structure, the former is described as syllable-timed, whereas the latter is described as stress-timed (Major 1981, Farnetani andKori 1990). Furthermore, distinct rhythmic types can be found in different dialects of one language.…”