The intonation of neighboring varieties

Abstract

Despite the presence of several cross-variety studies on spoken varieties of regional Italian, research on the intonational transition across geographically close varieties is still scarce. This article tackles this issue by providing a first cross-variety comparison of question intonation in three neighboring varieties of Italian spoken in Campania, namely Neapolitan, Salerno and Cilento Italian. The three varieties are chosen based on their position with respect to the isoglosses identifying the Eboli-Lucera line. Such comparison is made possible using the methodological protocol outlined by Gili Fivela et al. (2015) and specifically concerns yes-no, wh- and disjunctive questions. This explorative study aims at identifying intonational features differenced by frequency of occurrence across space, thereby providing a basis for further quantitative studies on spatial distribution. Based on a corpus elicited with a combination of Discourse Completion Task and reading task, we analyze the phonological features of question tunes in Cilento Italian, while also comparing them to their counterparts in Neapolitan and Salerno Italian. Results show that the three varieties present systemic, realizational and phonotactic differences as well as differences in the frequency of occurrence of tonal events. The intraregional variation across Campania Italian varieties hints at an intonational transition featuring a smooth geographic cline.