Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
In the southern Italian dialect of Airola (Campania) feminine plural and masculine plural are distinguished by means of two phonological processes: metaphony and Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico (RF...Show moreIn the southern Italian dialect of Airola (Campania) feminine plural and masculine plural are distinguished by means of two phonological processes: metaphony and Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico (RF henceforth). They appear to be in complementary distribution and to create gender distinction in the plural of nouns; in fact, metaphony takes place in masculine plural forms, while RF marks feminine plural ones. Therefore, two distinct phenomena, one being phonological, namely metaphony, and one being phono-syntactic, namely RF, happen to interact within plural noun formation. These two processes, which developed separately, acquired, synchronically speaking, a value of gender distinction. Metaphony is a well-known phenomenon of Italian dialects, which consists in the raising or diphthongization of a stressed vowel under the influence of a non-adjacent following high vowel (Rohlfs 1966, Fanciullo 1994, Ledgeway 2009, Maiden 2010). In the dialect of Airola, it only affects mid vowels, namely /ɔ, o, e, ɛ/, and its attestation is not limited to the nominal class; it occurs, in fact, in various word categories, such as adjectives, verbs and possessive pronouns. RF is an external sandhi phenomenon which consists in the gemination of a word-initial consonant under the influence of a preceding word (Rohlfs 1970, Leone 1984, Loporcaro 1997, Borrelli 2002). In Airolano RF is lexically triggered, differently from the RF attested in Standard Italian, which occurs to be stress-induced. The aim of this thesis is to describe the two phenomena, metaphony and RF, in Airolano and to give an analysis of them in order to explain their division of labor. To do so, the processes are first analyzed separately. Then, a unified analysis is elaborated aiming to shed some light on the difference between genders in the plural of nouns. The analysis of the two phenomena will be based on data from Airolano that were collected in December 2013 and April 2014 by the author.Ten informants were selected, which were classified into four different age groups. All the recordings were, subsequently, transcribed in IPA and they appear in this form in the text. The full set of data is stored in the Italian Dialect archive of Leiden University.Show less
