Advances in Sociophonetics

152 Giovanna Marotta

the phenomenon appears to be gradual and continuous, as is often the case with

many sociophonetic indexes. Gradual phonetic processes are favored in some spe-

cific positions, whereas they are disfavored or weakened in others. In the case of

l-velarization, typological studies have shown that the prototypical position for

[ł] to emerge is the coda position; on the other hand, the relation between low

vowels and velarization of the lateral is expected because of normal coarticulatory

effects on speech production. For this reasons, the syllabic constraint allows to

identify the primary context of application of the process, whereas the reference

to the preceding segment only explains the gradualness of the process. In other

words, the coarticulatory effects apply to the lateral consonant whatever its place

of articulation, whereas [ł] is produced only in a specific syllabic context.

Therefore, the two constraints holding on l-velarization, i.e. vowel height and

coda position, do not have the same value in terms of shape. Only the syllabic

constraint is relevant in a system-oriented perspective, because the syllable posi-

tion is the context triggering the process, whereas the vowel hieght constraint has

the surface effect of increasing the degree of velarization. The latter constraint

exhibits fine phonetic detail which is not relevant for the shape of the sociopho-

netic process (see also the final section of the paper).

5.7 Oxytone infinitives

At the morpho-phonological level, a rather common process taking place in Tuscan

varieties of Italian (and in many other sub-standard varieties of the Centre-South

of Italy) is the truncation of the verbal infinitive forms, as in the examples in (14):

(14) Tsc. cantà ‘to sing’, andà ‘t o g o’, vedé ‘t o s e e’, sentì ‘t o h e a r ’, uscì ‘to go out’,

conósce ‘to know’, instead of SI cantàre, andàre, vedére, uscìre, sentìre, conóscere.

The latter example additionally shows that also pro-paroxytones, and not only

paroxytones may undergo the truncation process, thus giving rise to paroxytons

truncated infinitives. The loss of the final unstressed syllable -re of the infinitive

is attested across Tuscany as well as in a wide area of the Center-South of Italy

(see Rohlfs 1968: 359–360; Savoia 1990). The process of syllable deletion is very

frequent in current speech of Tuscan people, especially during informal conversa-

tions of the speakers from the North-Western area of the region (Marotta 2000).^14

Its shape can be described in the following formal terms:

14. In Standard Italian, especially in the poetic register – but sometimes also in Tuscan rural
    speech – the verbal infinitives also show allomorphs ending with the rhotic consonant, i.e. with
    the loss of the final unstressed vowel only, such as in cantàr, vedér, sentìr, etc.; see Marotta (2000)
    for further details.