In Italian, in fact, gemination may reflect a kind of assimilation across word boundaries in particular circumstances, giving rise to the so-called syntactic gemination effect. Single and geminated form intervocalicallyĪlthough gemination is found in many languages, in Italian it has a peculiar property that distinguishes it from many others. Table I shows a list of the Italian consonants and their geminate counterparts and summarizes the specific properties of the different consonants. For these five consonants, the orthographic transcription makes use of the presence of either one or two graphemes, as in the words azione (/ats'tsjone/) (action) vs polizza (/'politstsa/) (policy), for instance, although /ts/ is acoustically geminated in both words. Throughout this study, we will characterize gemination properties in agreement with what is proposed by Muljacic (1972), and, in particular, we will assume that all Italian consonants except /z/ can be geminated, although the above five consonants do have a special status, in that these particular consonants are always geminated in intervocalic position and there exist no minimal pairs based on the contrastive gemination effect. As a matter of fact, most Italian consonants can be geminated in intervocalic position, with the exception of a few such as /z/, although different experts of Italian phonology hold contrasting views regarding a particular subset of five consonants /ts, dz, ʃ, ɲ, λ/. This is the case in Italian for most consonants: stop consonants as well as a subset of nasals and fricatives. In Italian-see the examples above-when a geminate consonant appears within a word, it is usually orthographically transcribed as two consecutive graphemes of the same consonant. This suggests that syntactic gemination occurs during a post-lexical phase of production planning, after timing has already been established. The second burst, when present, is accommodated within the closure interval in syntactic geminates, while lexical geminates are lengthened by the extra burst. Moreover, the timing of these bursts suggests a different planning process for lexical vs syntactic geminates. ![]() Results also revealed the presence, in about 10%–12% of instances, of a double stop-release burst, providing strong support for the biphonematic nature of Italian geminated stop consonants. Results confirmed previous studies showing that duration is a prominent gemination cue, with a lengthened consonant closure and a shortened pre-consonant vowel for both types. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of Italian lexical and syntactic gemination, asking if the correlates for the two types are similar in the case of stop consonants. In contrast, syntactic gemination occurs across word boundaries and affects the initial consonant of a word in specific contexts, such as the presence of a monosyllabic morpheme before the word. ![]() Italian lexical gemination is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic.
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