14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Question Intonation in Sienese Italian

Giovanna Marotta (1), Patrizia Sorianello (2)

(1) Department of Linguistics, University of Pisa, Italy
(2) Department of Philology, University of Siena, Italy

In recent years, the intonation of spoken Italian has been studied not only with reference to Standard Italian, but also to some regional varieties. This paper concerns the analysis of question intonation in the variety of Italian spoken in Siena (Tuscany). In particular, wh-questions and yes-no questions are investigated. The analysis is based on a corpus of spontaneous speech and read dialogues produced by three young speakers. The intonation patterns of questions are analyzed according to the autosegmental theory.
   In Sienese speech, interrogative intonation exhibits pitch accents and boundary tones which are different from other varieties of Italian. On the other hand, Sienese wh-questions and yes-no questions differ one another in their prosodic patterns.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Marotta, Giovanna / Sorianello, Patrizia (1999): "Question intonation in Sienese Italian", In ICPhS-14, 1161-1164.