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The Syntax of Word-Initial Consonant Gemination in Italian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Donna Jo Napoli and
Marina Nespor
Donna Jo Napoli
Affiliation:
Washington, DC
Marina Nespor
Affiliation:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Abstract

Word-initial consonants may be lengthened in Italian under certain phonological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic conditions. This phenomenon is known in the literature as Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS). The syntactic conditions on RS for two principal varieties of Italian are examined here, and it is proposed that RS is sensitive to the syntactic notion of ‘left branch’. Thus RS is a phonological rule which has access to surface tree-structure. The proposal here accounts in a simple way for great masses of data and also delimits the possible structural analyses of any given sentence in Italian.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1979, pp. 812 - 841
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by Linguistic Society of America

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