This monograph investigates final vowel elision in spoken Italian. Specifically, the book sheds light on the functioning and the constraining factors of final vowel elision in sequences of vowel-final determiners followed by vowel-initial nouns and in sequences of vowel-final proclitics followed by vowel-initial lexical verbs. The analysis is based on "real" language, that is on corpus and elicited data as well as on their pooled results. The quantitative data are analyzed statistically in order to identify the factors which constrain final vowel elision (i.e. function word class, the morphological category of number realized by the final elidable vowel, and speech style). The representation of final vowel elision in determiners and proclitics proposed in this monograph relies on four theoretical constructs and on their interaction, i.e pre-compiled phrasal allomorphy, dominant allomorphs, lexically encoded selectional preferences among allomorphs, and prosodic rules.

Contents: Final elision in spontaneous speech - Final elision in elicited speech - Final elision: evidence from spontaneous and elicited speech - The lexical representation of determiners and proclitics targeted by final elision - Representation of final elision.

Luigia Garrapa has completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and at the University of Salento, Italy (Joint PhD). Her research interests are the phonetics and phonology of Romance languages, child first language acquisition, and cognitive neurosciences. She is currently working on the neurophysiological correlates of Italian vowel and consonant perception by pediatric cochlear implant users.