Chapter 5. New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes 157
it is beyond dispute that different levels of social salience exist on the perceptual
side of the sociolinguistic variation in every speech community. The parameter of
weight would precisely represent this perceptual and social salience as expressed
by the listeners.^17
In language, in general, and in sociolinguistic environment, in particular,
heavy can easily be read as synonymous of dialectal, peasant, rustic. In short, it has
a negative social connotation. On the opposite side, light is positive, as it is synony-
mous of standard, urban, refined, elegant. Therefore, heavy implies [− prestigious]
whereas light implies [+prestigious].
Coming back to the sociophonetic processes considered so far, s-affrication in
post-consonantal context is a process which attains a high degree of thickness and
a low value of weight. The quantitative analysis we carried out on various corpora
of spontaneous speech has shown that Tuscan speakers produce [ts] instead of
[s] with very high percentages, normally more than (85%).^18 At the same time,
speakers who produce s-affrication do not appear to be aware of the process. This
lack of awareness is the reason for assigning the [+light] value of weight, at least
within the geographical boundaries of Tuscany. Outside the region, the values of
weight may change. In particular, Tuscan pronunciations such as [ˈsaltsa] ‘sauce’
or [ˈbortsa] ‘bag’ could be evaluated as odd and dialectal, then socially low or
even rude (in our terms, as [+heavy]), by Northern speakers of Italian, whereas
Southern speakers would probably judge the same pronunciations as normal and
similar to the standard, because the same process of s-affrication occurs in their
varieties of the national language.
1 7. Passing from one metaphor to another, a quite interesting correlation might be observed:
the possible semantic associations concerning the opposition between heavy and light are all
represented in terms of positive versus negative poles. As a matter of fact, heavy has a negative
connotation, especially in our contemporary Western society, where heavy is associated to fat
or low-educated and rude behaviour. On the other side, light has a positive connotation: in
advertising, in movies as well as in variable performance, people have to be light in their bod-
ies as well as in their behaviour (food must be light, our way of walking and maybe our way of
thinking should be light as well, etc.).
- We are basically referring to the unpublished report by M.A. student Alice Idone in
2010–2011, who carried out quantitative and qualitative analyses on a set of free conversations
among young Tuscan people. This research on the occurrence of some phonological processes
in Tuscan speech was part of her stage at the Laboratory of Phonetics of the University of
Pisa during the academic year 2010–2011. The results reported in Idone’s study agree with
other empirical data collected and discussed in some M.A. theses of the Master Course in
Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics of the same University under the supervision of
the author of this paper.