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This article is concerned with basic intonational features of Sicilian, a Romance variety spoken in Sicily in Southern Italy. While there has been some research on the intonational features of the regional variety of Italian, Sicilian intonation remains undescribed. The first part of the article provides a historic overview of the dialectal configuration of Sicilian and the Sicilian-Italian diglossia. In the subsequent section we perform an intonational analysis on a Sicilian corpus containing acoustic data of 432 utterances (216 broad focus statements and 216 information-seeking yes-no questions). Once the basic intonational features of Sicilian are described and analyzed we use the informatic tool ProDis (Elvira-García et al. 2018) for a quantitative cluster analysis in order to define geoprosodic groups within Siciliy. Finally, we carry out another cluster analysis with the aim of modelling prosodic distances between Romance varieties spoken in different areas in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spoken Spanish in Leon and Palencia, in the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula, bears traces of the historical development at various different linguistic levels. The main aim of this study is to describe the prosody of open questions in the speech of each of the two cities and compare these prosodic patterns with those of other points in the Peninsula and islands (the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands), and those of the Asturian accent of Oviedo. The research falls within the general framework of the projects undertaken for the AMPER (Contini 1992) and the methodology employed in so called dialectometry (Goebl 1981) based on the tool ProDis (Elvira-García/Balocco/Roseano/Fernández Planas 2018; Fernández Planas 2016 a, 2016 b; Fernández Planas/Roseano/Elvira-García/Balocco 2017a). The work is being carried out with data from 20 informants from 12 survey points, with a large corpus of more than 4000 open questions. The results show that the two above-mentioned survey points have different intonation melodies. We would like to see this work as a contribution to the study of diachronic prosody using instrumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on some intonational features of three Romance languages spoken in northern Sardinia (Algherese Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and the Sardinian regional variety of Italian). The first part of the article shows, by means of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, that the above-mentioned languages share some intonational features that are not present in the dialects of Catalan and Italian spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula, respectively. In the following sections the article puts forward a diachronic explanation for this intonational convergence, basing on the role of Sardinian as a substrate language for both Algherese Catalan and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The final part of the article proposes a generalization of the findings of the case-study and puts forward a diachronic model of prosodic transfer that includes the mechanisms of direct transfer, fusion, and accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]