Italian

Abstract

In spontaneous conversational speech, reduction is a pervasive phenomenon attested across different languages. Given the sporadic nature of studies on speech reduction in Italian, this contribution aims to: a) explore the different strategies of reduction in Italian spontaneous speech, showing new empirical evidence, through a spectrographic phonetic analysis, and b) provide quantitative data on the main patterns of the phenomenon.

After a review of phonetic reduction studies conducted on different languages, including Italian, the paper presents an analysis based on a dialogue of around 30 minutes between two native speakers of Italian coming from Bolzano.

The analysis of the conversation allowed to draw up a very rich collection of cases of phonetic reduction. For both speakers, about 39% of the words are produced in a reduced form. To illustrate certain reduction processes, some occurrences were analyzed spectrographically in detail. In the data examined, reduction phenomena affect functional words more frequently than content words.