PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

The course is one of the core educational activities of the MA course in Language Sciences, curricula in Language and Cognition, and Linguistics for Deafness and Language and Learning Disorders. It is one of the linguistic disciplines promoting metalinguistic awareness, through the acquisition of models of speech and their application to the languages spoken by the student. In particular, the course aims to illustrate the principles and rules of phonetic description on the one hand, and, on the other, to present the fundamentals of phonology, in order to promote understanding of the nature and features of speech sounds and how they are exploited to convey linguistic meaning.

Students will acquire the fundamentals of phonetics, with special emphasis on articulatory description. On the other hand, they will understand the fundamentals of the phonological analysis.
On the basis of the acquired theoretical and methodological competence, students will be able to understand the phonetic/phonological structure of the Italian language, applying their knowledge to the IPA transcription. The analysis will be carried out under a contrastive perspective with local languages spoken in the Italian territory and other languages spoken in Europe.
Practice of transcription will develop the critical competence of students, who will phonetically analyse speech, and as a consequence improve their pronunciation skills.

No specific previous knowledge is required.

Object and main areas of application of phonetics
Articulatory phonetics: phonatory apparatus and sound emission
Classifications of vowels and consonants
Intersegmental and suprasegmental phenomena
The sounds and phonotactic rules of Italian
Phonetic transcription with IPA alphabet (with exercises)
Notes on the phonetic characteristics of Italian-Romance dialects and some European languages
Fundamentals of phonology
Phonological inventory of Italian
Phonological transcription (with exercises)
Phonological rules and phonological features (with exercises)
Phonetic/phonological changes in a diachronic perspective (with exercises)
Socio-phonetics (with fieldwork examples)

Maturi, P. (2014). I suoni delle lingue, i suoni dell'italiano. Bologna: il Mulino. (complete)
Marotta, G. & Vanelli, L. (2021). Fonologia e prosodia dell'italiano. Roma: Carocci. (only PARTE PRIMA – FONOLOGIA SEGMENTALE)

An article of your choice between:
• Nocchi, N. & Filipponio, L. (2012), Lo vuoi co[z]ì o co[s]ì? A sociophonetic study on sibilants in the regional Italian of Livorno (Tuscany). In S. Calamai, C. Celata, & L. Ciucci (2012) (Eds.), Sociophonetics at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication (pp.53-56). Pisa: Edizioni della Scuola Normale.

• Dixon, J. A., Mahoney, B., & Cocks, R. (2002). Accents of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race, and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21(2), 162-167. https://doi.org/10.1177/02627X02021002004

The slides with the topics covered in class are available on the Moodle platform.

Oral exam. Students need to demonstrate that they have acquired the theoretical concepts of the discipline, that they are able to correctly carry out phonetic and phonological transcriptions, and that they are able to recognise any phonetic/phonological regularities in linguistic data.

Face-to-face lessons; exercises of phonetic / phonological transcription and analysis. Students are encouraged to class practice.

Italian

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "International cooperation" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development