Phonetic cues to diatopic variation in Campania Italian intonation

The study explores the phonetics and phonology of statements in two neighboring varieties of Italian, i.e., Salerno (SI) and upper Cilento (CI) Italian. SI and CI are geographically close to each other but belonging to two different sub-areas of the Southern Italo-Romance dialects. Accordingly, we investigate the encoding and realization of broad focus and corrective- contrastive focus statements across the bundle of isoglosses known as Eboli-Lucera line. Based on Discourse Completion Task data we show that CI and SI encode the two focus conditions in a similar way, with phonetic differences in the implementation of H+L* and L+H* nuclear accents. Such differences are quantitatively investigated through a production experiment based on a Reading Task. Results confirm inter-variety differences in the distribution and phonetic realization of declarative tunes with CI showing the presence of a prenuclear peak in both focus conditions. Results are discussed in terms of different phonetic realizations between the two varieties as regards both the nuclear and prenuclear region of declaratives. Intra-variety individual variability is ascribed to diatopic variation since it appears to indicate