8 Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
uses, their geographic micro-diversifications and their extraordinary histori-
cal depth, are not only “the focus in the optical system of Romance linguistics”
(Lausberg 1974: 252), but also an extremely attractive, thus far almost unexplored
domain for sociophonetic excursions.
The papers by Giovanna Marotta and Rosanna Sornicola & Silvia Calamai offer
two different sociophonetic rereadings of Italo-Romance dialectal phenomena.
G. Marotta’s “New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes. Evidence from
the Tuscan varieties of Italian” is based on recent empirical work on the pho-
netic variability of Tuscan varieties. It aims at proposing a parametric evaluation
of sociophonetic variation by making reference to the metaphor of solid bodies.
Sociophonetic features can be viewed as solid bodies, i.e., entities that occupy a
specific space in the domain of language and extend over a specific time span.
They can be evaluated through a series of parameters, which correspond to the
dimensions of the solid bodies – i.e., ‘Shape’, ‘Size’, ‘Thickness’, and ‘Weight’. These
parameters summarize the distributional properties of a specific dialectal phe-
nomenon with respect to its diffusion in the phonological system (e.g., the number
of segments affected by a given phenomenon), across different speech styles (e.g.,
the degree of control that the speaker can exert over a certain pronunciation fea-
ture), and in the social community (e.g., the prestige or the stigma that a certain
pronunciation feature may have within a given community). The parameters are
also shown to be able to account for both categorical and optional or gradient
properties of phonetic variation.
The examples are taken from the Tuscan dialectal repertoire: from Gorgia
Toscana to l-velarization, from s-affrication to Rafforzamento Sintattico, and oth-
ers. It is shown that the parameters are not independent of one another, at least
in certain cases. This is due to the fact that they do not refer to the same level of
linguistic description: ‘Shape’ and ‘Size’ are purely “descriptive parameters”, while
“‘Thickness’ refers to the speaker’s behavior” and “‘Weight’ makes crucial refer-
ence to the listener” (p. 159). Therefore, a certain variation along the dimension of
one parameter often carries the consequence of introducing a change in the value
of a related parameter as well. For this reason, the author envisages among the
future steps of the analysis the construction of a multi-factorial scale to account for
the interdependence of selected parameters for individual phonetic phenomena
of the Tuscan dialectal space, and the clarification of aspects of the “speaking-
listening loop” that appears to be so crucial in the evaluation of socially structured
variation in speech – as other papers of this volume equally emphasize.
The liveliness of Italo-Romance dialects and the importance of the sociopho-
netic values associated with local and regional features for the analysis of indi-
vidual variation are also treated in Rosanna Sornicola & Silvia Calamai’s paper
“Sound archives and linguistic variation: the case of the Phlegraean Diphthongs”.