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L‟espansione della dittongazione nei giovani
pescatori di Pozzuoli (NA).
Dati acustici su un cambiamento fonetico in corso
Giovanni Abete, Adrian Simpson
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
giovanni.abete@libero.it; adrian.simpson@uni-jena.de
Abstract
The dialect of Pozzuoli is characterized by a context-dependent alternation between
monophthongs and diphthongs. A word such as pisci „fishes‟ can be rendered as
[pɤɪʃʃ] before high prosodic boundaries, while it will be rendered as [piʃʃ] in
internal position. This phenomenon is very pervasive, because it involves 4 vocalic
variables ((i), (e), (o), (u)) and is unlimited by syllable structure. In this paper we
will discuss how the younger fishermen have been spreading this phonetic
alternation to the variable (ε). The data were collected from casual conversations
with fishermen of Pozzuoli. An acoustic analysis was performed. We measured the
duration of the vocalic segments and used several techniques to characterize the
diphthong dynamics. The diffusion of diphthongization in this community is
particularly intriguing because of the sociolinguistic status of diphthongs. They are
overtly stigmatized, even by those speakers who actually extend the use of
diphthongization themselves. The results of this research, therefore, highlight the
question of the complex interactions between opinions, attitudes and actual
linguistic behaviour. These data suggest the search for “covert” factors in order to
explain the maintenance and spreading of non-standard locally-marked features.
1 Introduzione 1
Si presentano in questo contributo alcuni risultati di uno studio sulla
―dittongazione spontanea‖ nei dialetti dell‘Italia meridionale 2 . Con
―dittongazione spontanea‖ si intende qui un fenomeno di alternanza
sincronica tra esiti monottongali e esiti dittongali di alcune variabili
vocaliche. Le analisi acustiche hanno mostrato come tale alternanza
1 Ai fini accademici i paragrafi 1-4 sono da attribuirsi a Adrian Simpson e 5-8
a Giovanni Abete.
2 Cfr. Abete (in preparazione).