Syntactic doubling

Syntactic doubling is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian and some other Italo-Western languages. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant after words of certain categories.

The phenomenon is variously referred to in the English language as word-initial gemination, phonosyntactic consonantal gemination, as well as under the native Italian terms: raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), raddoppiamento iniziale, rafforzamento iniziale (della consonante)

In Italian, syntactic doubling occurs after the following words. (with exceptions described below):
*all stressed ("strong") monosyllables ("monosillabi forti") and many unstressed ("weak") monosyllables: è, e, o, a, da, fra, che, se, ma, più, può, gru, re, blu, tre, me, te, sé, ciò, no, sì, già, giù, là, lì, qua, qui, né
** Example: Andiamo a casa IPA| [ãndiˈaːmo akˈkaːsa] , "Let's go home"
*all polysyllables stressed on the final vowel (this and the previous types are called oxytone words)
** Example: Parigi è una città bellissima IPA| [paˈriʤi ˈɛ ˈuːna ʧitˈtabbelˈlissima] , "Paris is a very beautiful city"
*some paroxytone words (stress on the second last syllable): come, dove, qualche, sopra, sovra
**Example: "Come va"? IPA| ['kome'vva] , "How are you?"

Articles, clitic pronouns (mi, ti, lo, etc.) and various particles do not cause doubling.

The cases of doubling are commonly classified into "stress-induced doubling" and "lexical"Doris Borrelli (2002) "Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian: A Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Dialectical Study" (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics) Routledge, ISBN 0415942071] .

"Syntactic" means that gemination spans word boundaries, as opposed to the ordinary geminated consonants as e.g., in "grappa". The emergence of syntactic doubling has traditionally been explained by a phenomenon of the loss of terminal consonants in Italian during its evolution from the Latin language (e.g. "ad"->"a", "quid"->"qui", etc.), however more recent research also pays attention to aspects.

Syntactic doubling is standard native pronunciation in Central and Southern Italy, including Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. In Northern Italian dialects, north of the La Spezia-Rimini Line, and in Northern Italian versions of Standard Italian, it does not exist.

Syntactic doubling usually is not reflected in spelling, unless a new word is produced by the fusion of the two: "chi sa"-> "chissà" ("who knows" in the meaning "goodness knows"; "Chissà chi lo sa" is a popular program for children). In phonetic transcription, e.g., in the Zingarelli dictionary, the words that lead to syntactic doubling are appended with the asterisk, e.g., the preposition "a" is transcribed as /a*/.

Syntactic doubling is one of the more prominent challenges for foreigners learning Italian pronunciation.

Exceptions to the basic rules

Consonant gemination does not happen when:
*a pause occurs on the boundary of word in questionAbsalom, Matthew, Stevens, Mary, and Hajek, John, [http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001538/ "A Typology of Spreading, Insertion and Deletion or What You Weren’t Told About Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian"] , in "Proc. 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society", Macquarie University ( [http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001538/01/Absalom_et_al.pdf e-print pdf file] )]
**In particular, the initial gemination may be conditioned by syntax. For example, in the phrase "La volpe ne aveva mangiato metà prima di addormentarsi" ("The fox had eaten half of it before falling asleep"), there is no gemination after "metà", because "prima" is part of the adjunct, a sentence element phonologically isolated from the main clause within the prosodic hierarchy of the phrase. [Nespor, Marina & Irene Vogel (1986). Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.]
*the stressed final vowel is lengthened
*a sharp break or change in the pitch on the word boundary happens

There are other considerations, especially in various dialects, so that the initial gemination is in fact subject to complicated lexical, syntactic, and phonological/prosodic conditions.

References

* [http://www.locuta.com/edoubling.html Syntactic Doubling]
*Robert A. Hall, Jr. "Initial Consonants and Syntactic Doubling in West Romance", "Language", Vol. 40, No. 4 (1964), pp. 551-556
*Absalom, Matthew, and Hajek, John (2006), [http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00002428/01/absalom-hajek.pdf "Raddoppiamento sintattico and Prosodic Phonology: A Re-evaluation"] , In Allan, Keith, Eds. "Proceedings 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society", Monash University.