This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns. Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and description of the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever framework the reader chooses to employ. The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.

This Italian reference grammar provides students, teachers and others interested in the Italian language with a comprehensive, accessible and jargon-free guide to the forms and structure of Italian. Whatever their level of knowledge of the language, learners of Italian will find this book indispensable: it gives clear and detailed explanations of everything from the most elementary facts such as the relation between spelling and pronunciation, or the forms of the article, to more advanced points such as the various nuances of the subjunctive. Formal or archaic discourse is distinguished from informal, everyday usage, and regionalisms are also indicated where appropriate. The authors have taken care to make it an easy and illuminating reference tool: extensive cross-referencing enables readers to quickly find the information they require, and also stimulates them to discover new, related facts.

The term ‘Maya’, in Indian traditions, refers to our sensory perception of the world and, as such, to a superficial reality (or ‘un–reality’) that we must look beyond to find the inner reality of things. Applied to the study of language, we perceive sounds, a superficial reality, and then we seek structures, the underlying reality in what we call phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume starts with an introduction by the editors, which shows how the various papers contained in the volume reflect the spectrum of research interests of Andrea Calabrese, as well as his influence on the work of colleagues and his students. Contributors, united in their search for the abstract structures that underlie the appearances of languages include linguists such as Adriana Belletti, Paola Benincà, Jonathan Bobaljik, Gugliemo Cinque, David Embick, Mirko Grimaldi, Harry van der Hulst, Michael Kenstowicz, Maria Rita Manzini, Andrew Nevins, Elizabeth Pyatt, Luigi Rizzi, Leonardo Savoia, Laura Vanelli, Bert Vaux, Susi Wurmbrand, as well as a few junior researchers including Mariachiara Berizzi, Giuliano Bocci, Stefano Canalis, Silvio Cruschina, Irina Monich, Beata Moskal, Diego Pescarini, Joseph Perry, Roberto Petrosino, and Kobey Schwayder.

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.