Vowel lengthening in northern Italy: A case for segmental and prosodic optimization
type: CreativeWork
description: 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.
abstract: 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.
author: Prieto-Vives, Pilar
language: eng
keywords: Language, Linguistics, Literature, Romance
date published: 2011-05-07T13:04:31Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:17Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/21297