Events

Abstract

“Continuum con addensamenti”, ‘continuum with agglomerations’: this is how Berruto once described the Italian linguistic repertoire. Much has been discussed about the extremes of this continuum; however, little do we know about those intermediate “agglomerations”. How many are there? How are they organized? Do they share features? To address these questions, we adopt a phonetic perspective and borrow a technique typically used in commercial profiling. Examining established Neapolitan phonetic features alongside new prosodic parameters, we identify possible speaker profiles and features agglomerations, shedding a new light on the intermediate varieties of the Italian standard-dialect continuum. In this talk, I will discuss preliminary studies and findings, applying this innovative methodology to offer new insights into the nature of the concept of variety.

Due to the distance measures taken by UGent to prevent the spread of CoViD-19, the next edition of our series "Get to know your colleagues" will take place via Bongo Virtual Classroom.

Christoph Anderl, Suzanne Burdorf, and Shan Bai will introduce themselves and tell us about their projects.

Sign up for ΔiaLing on Ufora to attend: https://ufora.ugent.be/d2l/home/209802.