Glottalization at phrase boundaries in Tuscan and Roman Italian

Phonological accounts of Italian traditionally exclude glottal consonants from the sound inventory of the language. However, a number of studies have reported creak in vowels in word-final stressed open syllables, suggesting the presence of a following glottal stop. The present study, which features acoustic analysis of read speech from four speakers of Tuscan and Roman Italian, investigates two possible sources of this glottalization: (1) a glottal consonant filling an empty mora posited for final stressed syllables, and (2) prosodic boundary marking. Results show no evidence of a glottal coda — glottalization occurs predominantly at phrase boundaries, with target vowels bearing stress and/or occurring in hiatus showing an increased rate of glottalization. A proposal is made for glottalization as prosodic boundary marking, where it serves to clearly define constituent edges and to block processes signaling cohesion between words, such as raddoppiamento sintattico and vowel coalescence, particularly where there is an intervening phrase boundary.