Chapter 5. New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes 155
(16) if x is more frequent than y, then x is thicker than y
where x and y correspond to two sociophonetic processes characterized by a dif-
ferent percentage of use.
In this sense, the capacity of the speaker of controlling his/her own pronuncia-
tion is assumed to be a function of the occurrence of the relevant sociophonetic
indexes. Said in a different way: the more the control realized by the speaker, the
less frequent the occurrence of sociolinguistically marked variants. Speakers may
control their pronunciation in the case of some processes, whereas in others they
have no control at all in the production of the phonetic cues indexing a specific
sociolinguistic value.
The speaker, his behaviour and his attitudes are crucial for assigning a
thickness value to a certain sociophonetic process. While size and shape are
attributes of the phonological processes independent from the speaker, thick-
ness cannot dispense with the speaker. Consider again the case of gorgia toscana
and its target classes, i.e. plosives and palatal affricates (§5.1 and §5.2). There
seems to be a different behaviour in the speakers with reference to the conso-
nant classes involved. The picture which has been drawn after years of empirical
analysis is such that the spirantization of the palatal affricates is less prone to
the direct control by the speaker as well as to the censure of the listeners than
the spirantization of the stops (Marotta 2008). In our terms, we could say that
the first process is thicker than the second. Indeed, native speakers of Tuscan
varieties can only pronounce an intervocalic palatal affricate /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ with
great articulatory effort and a high degree of self-control.^16 In the same phonetic
context, the fricative allophones of the stops can be more easily suppressed,
especially at some diaphasic levels.
In the everyday speech of Tuscan speakers almost mandatory is the occur-
rence of RF as well as of s-affrication, with consequent high levels of thickness.
In the case of RF, the fact that the phenomenon also belongs to Standard Italian,
or at least to the Central and Southern varieties of it, encourages the application
of the process.
If gorgia, RF and s-affrication obtain the highest values of thickness, the
other sociophonetic processes of Tuscan considered here are assigned a middle
score, in the case of truncated infinitives, or a relatively low score, in the case of
l-velarization and apocope.
- Many Italians probably remember the anecdote that one of the past presidents of the Italian
Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who was a native speaker of Leghorn, was unable to produce
the palatal affricates in intervocalic position (nor could he read it aloud), whereas, in the same
context, he could pronounce the intervocalic stops in alternation with their weak counterparts,
i.e. the fricative consonants.