Abstract
It is known that the mid vowel contrasts of Standard Italian distinguish few minimal pairs, may be lexically variable, and show some degree of phonological conditioning in certain varieties. As such, they are relevant to recent suggestions that phonemic contrast may be partial, gradient, or otherwise more cognitively complex than traditionally assumed. Production data and vowel height judgments from 17 speakers con rm that most have clear phonetic distinctions between higher and lower mid vowels. However, the lexical distribution of these vowels is variable, and (in some speakers) phonologically conditioned to some extent; and though phonological awareness for all speakers is broadly accurate, we also observe cases where production and speaker judgment fail to match, in part because individual speakers’ productions are variable. This suggests that the somewhat marginal status of the Italian mid vowel contrasts resides in the link between phonetic categories and individual lexical items, not in any indistinctness of the phonetic categories themselves.
Highlights
Reports of phenomena such as marginal contrasts, near mergers, and incomplete neutralization have appeared in the literature for many years, but phonological theory has yet to deal with them in any coherent way
We show that speakers are generally reliable judges of their own vowel use, while the analysis that follows in Section 4 identifies and discusses mismatches between speakers’ judgment and production
In some cases, it is visually obvious that a given vowel token labeled as ‘high-mid’ is in the middle of a cloud of tokens labeled ‘low-mid,’ or vice-versa; but because the high-mid and low-mid clouds may overlap, it is possible that tokens appearing out of place in F1, F2 space were correctly labeled by the speaker
Summary
Reports of phenomena such as marginal contrasts, near mergers, and incomplete neutralization have appeared in the literature for many years, but phonological theory has yet to deal with them in any coherent way. Recently has it been suggested (e.g., Hall, 2012) that the notion of contrast on which the phonemic principle rests may require substantial reexamination, at least to acknowledge the complex set of factors affecting the relationships among pairs of sounds. Contrast was essentially the only criterion involved in deciding whether two phonetically distinct sound types represented two different phonemes.
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