My dissertation aims at providing a comprehensive study on the unstressed vowel system of the Romance varieties spoken in the transition area between central and southern Calabria, in the South of Italy. The outcomes of the unstressed vowels (especially if final) have always been taken in high consideration for the purpose of linguistic classification. In the case of Calabria, however, none of the linguistic partitions proposed by the scholars take into account this parameter. More generally, the unstressed vocalism of the Calabrian varieties appears to be a scarcely mentioned topic in the literature: for the part of Calabria that I will consider, in particular, previous studies are almost absent. My research will reopen these issues on the basis of fresh data coming from fieldwork in twelve different villages and examined on the light of acoustic analysis. The topic will be discussed also from a diachronic perspective: the examination of the available documentary material will allow to test some hypotheses (inferable from my previous researches) on the evolution of the Sicilian unstressed vocalism in this transitional area.

I graduated in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Pisa. My academic interests and experiences range widely, from historical linguistics to the domain of language technology, with a particular vocation for phonology, phonetics and Romance dialectology.