Between Italian and dialects

Abstract

This study addresses the relation between segmental structure and prosodic transfer in language contact by targeting boundary tones in questions in two contact varieties: Cilentan Italian (CI) and the Cilentan dialect (CD) (southern Italy). Utterance-final unstressed vowels in CD can either be fully preserved or centralised/deleted, leading to time pressure for high boundary tones. Our results seem to indicate that the segmental and tonal levels interact in the realisation of final rises which in turn can underlie convergence between contact varieties, in this case CI and CD. We suggest that final rises associating with a post-tonic syllable may represent convergence towards the standard, whereas low falls or tonal truncation in the absence of final segments may be indicative of convergence towards adjacent dialects.