Intonational phonology of the regional varieties of Italian

Italian shows large phonetic and prosodic variation that depends on the geographical and dialectal area the speakers come from. The chapter explicitly focuses on the intonational variation occurring in Italian and offers 1) the key elements of a shared transcription system able to take it into account and 2) an overview of the intonation patterns of thirteen varieties, spoken in cities and towns located in various areas of the Italian peninsula, i.e. Milan, Turin, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Rome, Pescara, Naples, Salerno, Cosenza, Bari, and Lecce. The main novelty in the paper is the clear and explicit effort made in offering analyses and transcriptions keeping always in mind cross-variety comparison, to finally facilitate cross-language comparison as well. Importantly, it is the first work on Italian in which this is systematically done on the basis of a wide and representative set of sentence types, as well as on a quite large set of varieties.