Rhythmic Structure in Italian Noun Phrases: A Study on Vowel Durations

Abstract This study deals with the temporal structure of 4- and 5-syllable noun phrases of one and of two constituents, produced as syntactic objects of Italian VP + NP sentences by 3 subjects. On the basis that vowel durational relations can reflect prominence relations, as previous data on Italian indicate, the study compares the durations of stressed vowels, vowels carrying secondary stress in compound words, and unstressed vowels in order to assess the effects of position within a phrase and to identify the rhythmic principles that regulate prominence relations among both stressed and unstressed vowels. The data indicate that the degree of prominence decreases from stressed vowels in phrase-final words to stressed vowels in non-final words, to rhythmically accented unstressed, to unaccented unstressed vowels. Vowels with secondary stress in compounds do not differ in duration from unstressed vowels. A remarkable finding is the very restricted range of variation of unstressed vowels. The data suggest that, although the rhythmic alternation rule in Italian disfavours adjacency and even proximity of two equally strong syllables, it does not disfavour sequences of two, three, four equally weak syllables. Sequences of unstressed vowels of nearly equal durations are also favoured by the absence of word boundary lengthening observed in the reiterant versions of our corpus. It is argued that the temporal organization of noun phrases that emerged from this investigation contributes to the perception of Italian as a syllable-timed language.