How widespread is preaspiration in Italy?

Preaspiration is a comparatively rare phonetic feature, almost entirely confined to languages spoken in far northwestern Europe (Andersen 2002; Helgason 2002). A recent acoustic phonetic investigation into consonant gemination in Sienese Italian (e.g. Stevens & Hajek 2007), however, found that preaspiration occurred in one third of geminate /pp tt kk/ tokens. Up until that point preaspirated stops had not been reported to occur in Sienese or any other variety of Italian including the standard language. With this in mind, the present paper presents the results of an acoustic phonetic investigation into voiceless geminate stops /pp tt kk/ in a controlled corpus of words read by speakers from 15 other Italian cities. Results are analysed according to city as well as factors (e.g. speaker sex, vowel type) known to favour occurrences of preaspiration in other better known preaspirating languages. Preliminary duration values are presented and results are discussed in terms of two specific hypotheses regarding the rise of preaspiration in Sienese Italian. Introduction & background Geminate consonants in Italian Consonant length is contrastive in (standard) Italian e.g. pala ‘shovel’ v. palla ‘ball’. The duration of the consonant, that of the preceding vowel, and the ratio between them (C/V) all play a role in signalling phonological consonant length (e.g. Pickett et al. 1999). Geminate voiceless stops /pp tt kk/, in particular, are described as unaspirated in all prosodic positions in standard Italian (e.g. Bertinetto & Loporcaro 2005). Manner of articulation has not been a focus of existing experimental phonetic studies on geminates in standard Italian (e.g. Pickett et al. 1999), however post-aspiration of geminate voiceless stops is reported to occur in Calabria (Sorianello 1996). Degemination is a feature of northern varieties and the geminates of standard Italian as pronounced by these speakers are often less salient (Bertinetto & Loporcaro 2005). Standard Italian and regional varieties The linguistic situation in Italy is complex and the standard language, while historically derived from Florentine Italian, is today perhaps best described as an abstraction only used, and increasingly less so, by trained speakers (Bertinetto & Loporcaro 2005). The pronunciation of standard Italian is influenced by distinct regional accents, which can be very broadly categorized into those of the north, centre (Tuscany) and south. The present study involves a list of standard Italian words read by speakers from 15 cities spread over these three regions. The controlled circumstances mean less regional influence on speakers’ pronunciation than would occur in a less formal setting. However, such data allow us to test whether preaspiration is a regional feature of Sienese or whether it occurs more widely and in standard Italian, as spoken across Italy.