160 Giovanna Marotta
plosive when preceded by a vowel (Marotta 2001/2004). Therefore, a production
such as [la ˈxaːsa] ‘the house’ is perceived as more prestigious, or in our terms,
lighter than [la ˈaːsa], with /k/ deletion.
In a parallel way, in North-Western Tuscany, saying [kwalˈkɔːza] ‘something’,
[ˈnaːzo] ‘nose’, [ˈpiːza] ‘Pisa’ may be considered nowadays more prestigious than
[kwalˈkɔːsa], [ˈnaːso], [ˈpiːsa] (with voiceless [s]), especially by the youngest speak-
ers, because [z] is the phonetic output of the sibilant in intervocalic context in
the Northern pronunciations of Italian. The use of allophones considered more
prestigious than the local ones by the speakers who want to attain a better social
and education level is widely described in traditional sociolinguistic analyses, and
Tuscany makes no exceptions.^22- Interactions among parameters
In this section, the possible interactions among the proposed parameters will be
shortly presented.
First, there seems to be a conspiracy between size and thickness: the more
the segments involved in a sociophonetic process, the higher the frequency of
usage of the indexes and the higher the degree of thickness. On the other hand,
size does not directly interact with weight. We have seen that processes with
great size can have a light value in social evaluation (e.g. gorgia), whereas others,
despite their small size, can be judged as heavy (e.g. l-velarization).
Although thickness interacts with weight, there is no direct and propor-
tional relation like the one summarized in the formula in (18):(18) if a process is thicker, then it is heavier.In fact, among the sociophonetic processes occurring in Tuscany, some have a
high degree of thickness (e.g. gorgia, in both its facets of stop lenition and deaf-
frication of palatal consonants; see also s-affrication) and they still maintain a low
value of sociolinguistic weight. Some others (e.g. truncated infinitives) show an
increasing degree of thickness which is strictly related to greater weight.
A further theoretical aspect concerns the nature of the sociophonetic
parameters proposed: they do not exhibit the same nature. Shape and size are- These phenomena have traditionally been considered as ipercorrettismi in Italian traditional
dialectology. The meaning of the term ipercorrettismo seems to be very similar to that of ambi-
tion as it has been recently proposed in sociophonetic theory, especially in the German frame-
work; see for instance Nocchi & Filipponio (2011).