From Sounds to Structures

Beyond the Veil of Maya

Roberto Petrosino, Pietro Cerrone, Harry van der Hulst

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501521317
• eBook ISBN: 9781501506635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The term 'Maya', in Indian traditions, refers to our sensory perception of the world and, as such, to a superficial reality (or 'un–reality') that we must look beyond to find the inner reality of things. Applied to the study of language, we perceive sounds, a superficial reality, and then we seek structures, the underlying reality in what we call phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume starts with an introduction by the editors, which shows how the various papers contained in the volume reflect the spectrum of research interests of Andrea Calabrese, as well as his influence on the work of colleagues and his students. Contributors, united in their search for the abstract structures that underlie the appearances of languages include linguists such as Adriana Belletti, Paola Benincà, Jonathan Bobaljik, Gugliemo Cinque, David Embick, Mirko Grimaldi, Harry van der Hulst, Michael Kenstowicz, Maria Rita Manzini, Andrew Nevins, Elizabeth Pyatt, Luigi Rizzi, Leonardo Savoia, Laura Vanelli, Bert Vaux, Susi Wurmbrand, as well as a few junior researchers including Mariachiara Berizzi, Giuliano Bocci, Stefano Canalis, Silvio Cruschina, Irina Monich, Beata Moskal, Diego Pescarini, Joseph Perry, Roberto Petrosino, and Kobey Schwayder.

Part I: Issues in Phonology

Stefano Canalis

The status of Italian glides in the syllable

1 Introduction

Italian glides pose several phonological problems, which are mainly due to the fact that they seem to exhibit properties of both vowels and consonants. While their phonetic nature is fairly well understood and consistent with findings from other languages, their phonological status is a matter of controversy, enough to remind of Larry Hyman’s statement that ‘‘[p]erhaps the most problematic segment type for all theories of phonology is the class of glides’’ (Hyman 1985: 77).

This paper aims to address the nature of their role within the syllable. In section 2 I will briefly discuss their relationship with diphthongs and hiatuses. In section 3 I will succinctly describe the phonetics and distribution of Italian glides. In section 4 some general information about their phonology will be provided, and in section 5 I will discuss falling diphthongs. In section 6 I will present some of the previous proposals about the syllabic role of Italian on-glides, as well as my own hypothesis. While previous analyses have argued that Italian glides are basically consonantal (on-glides belonging to the onset, and off-glides belonging to the coda), I will try to show that they are essentially vocalic in nature. On-glides are always syllabified within the nucleus, and form a single complex vocalic segment with the following root node (with the exception of the glide [w] after velar stops, which forms a complex consonantal segment with the latter). I will also argue that off-glides too are part of the nucleus, but as an independent segment of the diphthong they belong to. In order to prove these claims, I will present evidence from assimilatory processes, article allomorph selection, phonotactic distribution, and vowel duration.

2 Diphthongs and hiatuses

Before discussing glides in detail it may be useful to briefly examine their complex relationship with hiatuses. Glides typically occur next to a vowel, the two forming a diphthong – traditionally, diphthongs are defined as combinations of a vowel and a preceding or following glide (called ‘on-glide’ and ‘off-glide’ respectively) within the same syllable.1 When dealing with vocoid sequences, the question often arises whether they are diphthongs or hiatuses, the latter being defined as sequences of two syllabic nuclei. In fact, as simple and straightforward as they may be in theory, these definitions sometimes run into practical difficulties. Practically distinguishing Italian hiatuses from diphthongs may prove to be a tall order (see Marotta 1987 for a detailed discussion), mainly because the phonetic difference between the two categories is basically a continuum (Salza, Marotta, and Ricca 1987). Furthermore, underlying hiatuses may be realized as diphthongs (this possibility also occasionally extends to hiatuses with initial mid vowels, as (1b) shows).

(1)	a.	b[i]ologia ‘biology’ in slow speech → b[j]ologia in fast speech
	b.	parto cesar[e]o ‘Cesarean section’ → parto cesar[j]o (non-standard)

It has to be added, however, that in Italian the change is unidirectional; hiatuses may optionally become diphthongs, but underlying diphthongs never become hiatuses. A realization as in (2) would only be possible at an unnatural, artificially slow speech rate.

(2)

a.

p[j]ede ‘foot’ → ?* p[i]ede

Vowel/glide alternations seem to be affected by various factors (Marotta 1987: 871–877). One of them is lexical stress, as hiatuses tend to be preserved if one their vowels is stressed (a typologically common pattern – see e.g. Casali 1997); for instance, b[j]ologìa is more likely than b[j]òlogo ‘biologist’, ubr[i]àco ‘drunkard’ is more likely than ubr[i]acàrsi ‘to get drunk’. Another factor is sociolinguistic variation; in fast, allegro speech and informal contexts the diphthongization of hiatuses is more common. Finally, morphological boundaries also play a role, as the diphthongization of a hiatus is blocked (or at least is much less likely, even in fast speech) if a morphological boundary occurs between the two vowels: appendiabiti / apˈpɛndi#ˈabiti/ [apˈpɛndiˈaːbiti] ‘coat hanger’, riarmare /ri+arˈmare/ [riarˈmaːre] ‘rearm’, antiacari /ˈanti+ˈakari/ [ˈantiˈaːkari] ‘antiacarian’. There is also some geographical variation; for example, the standard Italian pronunciation of viaggio ‘journey’ is v[i]aggio, but in northern Italy v[j]aggio is very common.

In Italian, the difference between falling diphthongs and hiatuses is even more elusive than between hiatuses and rising diphthongs, as phonetically there is little difference between an unstressed vowel and the gliding part of a falling diphthong (see the phonetic data discussed in the next section). Especially word-finally, it is difficult to establish conclusively which phonological category high vocoids belong to.

3 Phonetics and distribution of Italian glides

Diphthongs (together with the closely related category of hiatuses) form a significant portion of the phonological material of Italian lexicon. According to Marotta (1987: 848), about 30% of Italian words have at least a diphthong or a hiatus. She also observes that her count probably underestimates diphthongs and hiatuses, since it is based on the entries of a dictionary; this implies that only citation forms were counted, but inflection – especially verbal – fairly often creates diphthongs and hiatuses in Italian.

Five phonetic glides are differentiated in the literature:

1. the palatal on-glide [j]
2. the labio-velar glide [w]
3. the labio-palatal on-glide [ɥ]2
4. the palatal off-glide [i̯]
5. the labio-velar off-glide [u̯]

In general, Italian glides have a shorter duration when compared to high vowels.3 Salza, Marotta, and Ricca (1987) found that /i, u/, even when unstressed, all else equal are longer than both on- and off-glides. Glides (especially on-glides) also seem to be more centralized than vowels; F2 was found to be lower in front glides than in /i/, and to be higher in labiovelar glides than in /u/ – which implies a more centralized realization that nuclear /i/ and /u/. Glides are also more constricted than high vowels, and their formant patterns are much less stable.

Within glides, off-glides display a more vocoid-like nature than on-glides. Salza, Marotta, and Ricca (1987), and Salza (1988) found that Italian off-glides are longer than on-glides; in fact, phonetically they basically are non-nuclear vocalic articulations (Mioni 2001: 176). Marotta (2010) reports a mean duration of 50 ms for on-glides and 80 ms for off-glides, compared with 120 ms for stressed vowels. Therefore, although some authors ignore the phonetic difference between Italian on-glides and off-glides in their phonetic transcriptions and use the IPA symbols [j] and [w] for both, in this paper these symbols are restricted to on-glides.

As for the distribution of Italian glides, most glide-vowel and vowel-glide combinations are phonologically licit, but there are some co-occurrence constraints (see Marotta 1987, 1988, 2010; Mioni 1993; Bertinetto and Loporcaro 2005; Krämer 2009). Among rising diphthongs, high clusters *[ji], *[wu] are impossible. Every other combination is attested: [ja], [jɛ], [je], [jɔ], [jo], [ju], [wa], [wɛ], [we], [wi], [wɔ], [wo]...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: Issues in Phonology
• Part II: Issues in Morpho-Phonology
• Part III: Issues in the Morpho-Syntax
• Part IV: Issues in Syntax
• Index