Lenition of voiceless fricatives in two varieties of southern Italian

Abstract

The aim of this study is to verify acoustically the extent to which the traditionally acknowledged lenition of intervocalic plosives in the varieties of southern Italy also applies to voiceless fricatives. Data from a recent corpus of semi-spontaneous speech collected in Naples and Palermo are analysed according to the parameters of duration, intensity, and voicing. It is demonstrated that, in the intervocalic position, the realisations of /s/ and /f/ are significantly shorter than in the other contexts, whereas intensity does not prove to be affected by the phonotactic position; sonorization does occur, to some extent, in the Neapolitan data, being marginal among the Sicilian speakers.