Chapter 5. New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes 151
Nowadays, the process of near-merging of /s/ and /ts/ is indeed dynamic.
Although we cannot know whether and when a complete merger will succeed, we
believe that the preservation of the original sibilant in this context will not succeed.
5.6 l-velarization
In the Tuscan varieties of Pisa and Leghorn, a velarization process of the lateral
consonant has been observed in context of gemination or in syllable coda position;
for instance, anello ‘ring’ [aˈnɛłːo], cavallo ‘horse’ [kaˈvałːo], molto much’ [ˈmołto]
(Marotta & Nocchi 2001; Nocchi & Marotta 2003).
From a typological point of view, we should observe that velarization of a
lateral sound in coda position is not a marked phenomenon. In many languages,
there are velarized allophones for /l/, as in Russian or English; also in other Italian
dialects the phenomenon is well attested (see Grassi et al. 1997, 2006).
The process of l-velarization in Pisa and Leghorn appears to be strongly con-
strained by sociolinguistic factors, because it is sensitive to age, gender and social
class: it occurs more often in young male people belonging to low social classes
(see further paragraphs).
In descriptive terms, its shape can be summarized as follows: /l/ velarizes
when it is geminate or it occupies the coda position in the syllable of a word. In
more formal terms, the shape of the process is quite simple:
(13) /l/ → [ł] / _
|
[Coda]σ^13
This phonological process appears to be sensitive to the nature of the preceding
segment too: the degree of velarization is inversely proportional to the height of
the preceding vowel. Therefore, it is higher when a low vowel precedes, as in the
cases of /a/, /ɛ/, /ɔ/, whereas it is lower after a high vowel, especially if it is the front
vowel /i/. The acoustic parameter taken into account is the value of F2 (Marotta &
Nocchi 2001; Nocchi & Marotta 2003).
We might wonder whether this last segmental constraint must be included
in the shape of the velarization process. The answer is negative. As a matter of
fact, we here are facing a kind of fine-grained phonetic variation: since the lat-
eral becomes progressively more velarized as an inverse function of vowel height,
- The reference to the syllabic structure is indeed sufficient to capture both contexts of the
process, since a geminate consonant is heterosyllabic in Italian (as usual in natural languages),
thus associated to two skeletal positions, the first one in coda and the second in onset of the
subsequent syllable.