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.

This contribution reports on a recent field mission carried out in the Ubangi River Basin (Central African Republic). Work focused on 31 varieties belonging to the Bantu, Ubangi, and Central Sudanic subfamilies of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. The primary objective was to document implosive and labial-velar consonants. To this end, acoustic, electroglottographic, and aerodynamic (pneumotachographic) data were collected. In the context of this presentation: I will present a detailed report on activities within the framework of this mission; I will illustrate the quality and typology of the data and exemplify the usefulness of integrated phonetic research with instances from Central Sudanic Bagiro; I will present a few general remarks on the merit of instrumental data collection for phonetic typology and phonological theory. The hope is that this will serve as a handy reference for fellow researchers interested in instrumental work in the field.