Vocale incerta, vocale aperta

Abstract

It is well known that Standard Italian contrasts open and closed mid vowels in stressed syllables and that this contrast is neutralized to closed in unstressed syllables. This paper reviews several lines of evidence that the open vowels are optimal in stressed position. These include stress shifts in- duced by affixation and truncation where stress is positioned on an underly- ingly unstressed vowel of the base and the speaker is thus presented with the choice of whether to realize the vowel as closed or open. We find that open vowels are systematically chosen. The same decision is made in loan- word adaptation. We develop a formal analysis based on the enhancement of stress by vowel sonority and duration. The phonetic assumptions underly- ing the phonological analysis are then addressed. The paper closes with a discussion of loanword adaptation in Slovenian where closed mid vowels are optimized instead of open.