Vowel lengthening in northern Italy: A case for segmental and prosodic optimization
The goal of this dissertation is to argue that a wide variety of historical and synchronic processes of vowel lengthening in many languages can be motivated as a way of optimizing segmental and prosodic structures. The northern Italian dialects are chosen as the main pool of data for the study of vowel lengthening and its conditionings, since in a relatively small area we find a great variety of vowel length developments. Moreover, some of the vowel developments are compelling for recent prosodic theory. A set of phonological optimization tendencies are proposed to be active in these dialects, and it is shown that the interaction between the prosodic and segmental optimization constraints are resolved by language-particular parametrization.
Language, Linguistics, Literature, Romance
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign