Lengthening and raddoppiamento fonosintattico

Within Romance, word-internal geminates have been preserved only in cent, and S. Italy and Sardinian. To geminates inherited from Latin (e.g., It. and Log. ['εssere] ‘to be’ < ESSE(*RE)), more were added mainly through cluster assimilation (e.g., FRIG(I)DU(M) > It. ['freddo] ‘cold’, CORNU(M) > Logudorese Sardinian ['korru] ‘horn’) or lengthening of an originally short consonant. Prosodically induced consonant lengthening after stress occurs sometimes in proparoxytones: It. ['femmina] ‘woman’, ['attimo] ‘moment’, [le’ʤittimo] ‘legitimate’. In Italian one also finds lengthening in other contexts (e.g., [paras'sita] ‘parasite’ < PARASITU(M)). However, along the Apennines from N. Tuscany to central-northern Marche, proparoxytonic lengthening has been considerably generalized (see section 4). Lengthening in C+[j/w] clusters occurs throughout Italo-Romance: e.g., It. ['viɲɲa] ‘vineyard’ < VINEA(M), ['akkwa] ‘water’ < AQUA(M). Since /ʃ/ /ʎ/ /ɲ/ /ts/ dz/ have their main (or exclusive) source in C+[j] clusters, these phonemes always occur long when postvocalic (except in modern northern dialects, where long consonants have been shortened). Word-initial dental affricates from other sources (e.g., Germanic or Arabic loans such as ['tsappa], ['tsukkero]) are equated with long non-initial geminates (and lengthened) in cent, dialects (Tuscan = romanesco [la t'tsappa] ‘the hoe’, [lo t'tsukkero] ‘the sugar’), but not in southern varieties: Altam. [la 'tsapp], [lʊ 'tsʏkkərə]. The list of phonemes only occurring long further includes, in many central-southern dialects: /ʤ/ and /b/, which are long everywhere (e.g., Roman, [rad’ʤone] ‘reason’, [rub'ba] ‘to steal’), and initial /r/ in Sicily and southern Calabria (['rrittsu] ‘chestnut husk’, cf. Rohlfs (1977a: 24)). Lengthening may also affect individual lexical items: [rre] ‘king’, [ccu] ‘more’ have a long consonant throughout the Centre-South; [nnu] ‘a’ (< UNU(M)) has long /n/ in Salentino, although no systematic lengthening of these consonants occurs in the relevant dialects. In addition to the word-internal geminates addressed so far, a systematic sandhi process, raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), operates in Standard Italian, cent. and S. Italy (including Corsican), and Sardinian. It involves lengthening of a word-initial consonant in word1-word2, sequences, and is a function of the phonological shape or lexical-morphological status of word1. In many varieties - not St. It., despite recent claims (see section 6) - RF also obeys syntactic constraints. For RF to apply, word2's initial consonant must be underlyingly short, and in onset position.