engleski

A comparative prosodic study of the Italian language in Italian and Slovenian news

It is known that languages that are spoken at or near the borders of different countries may show language contact effects. Little is known of how the varieties of Italian spoken outside the borders of Italy may show the influence of other languages. In Slovenia, as a result of the particular language contact situation, speakers use and are exposed to a variety of languages, including Italian, Slovenian and Croatian. It is thus highly likely that the variety of Italian spoken by the Italian National Community (INC) in Slovenia has unique characteristics reflecting the influence of Slovenian. To test this hypothesis, in this research we analyze the Italian variety spoken on TV Koper - Capodistria's newscast, a program produced in the Slovenian city of Koper, broadcasted to the Italian speaking minorities of both Slovenia (Litorale-Carso) and Croatia (Istria). This paper focuses on prosody and makes reference to previous research on the prosody of the Italian language used in TV news (e.g. Giannini and Pettorino 2010 ; Giannini 2004 ; Pettorino 2002, 2003 and Palumbieri 2003). The study addresses the following questions: (i) Are there differences in articulation rate, speech rate, pitch range, silent and respiratory pauses between the news produced in Italy and that produced in Slovenia (INC)? (ii) Do INC features show distinct prosodic features that can be interpreted as due to a Slavic i.e. Slovenian influence? The corpus consists of broadcast news copies produced by a) four journalists of the studio TG RAI (Italian Television), and by (b) four journalists of the studio of TG Tv Koper / Koper (Slovenia) ; all of the eight speakers were male. For each of the speakers 90 seconds were recorded and subsequently transcribed. An acoustic analysis of the data was carried out with the open source acoustic analysis software package Praat. The preliminary results show that there are significant prosodic differences between the Italian- speaking newscasts produced by TG RAI in Italy and those produced by TV Koper in Koper, Slovenia ; the Italian data extracted from the broadcast news copies by TvKoper presents substantially lower mean duration of consonants and vowels, greater fluency, articulation rate and speech rate. The Italian TG data is more vocalic than that of TvKoper and is furthermore characterized by a frequent use of epenthesis, that is almost absent in TvKoper. Both of these differences - the lower vocalism and the lower occurrence of epenthesis - might be explained as due to the effect of Slovenian.

Prosody ; language in newscasts ; language contact ; Italian ; Slovenia

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