Dialectal and social factors affect the phonetic bases of Neapolitan /s/-retraction

Abstract

This paper presents a sociophonetic study on a variable of Neapolitan spoken in Campania. In particular, the aim is to investigate the use of the realisation of the voiceless and voiced alveolar fricatives /s, z/ as a voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], in pre-consonantal environments, e.g. [’ʃpalla] “shoulder”o [’ʃka:la] “ledder”. After the acoustic analysis, the paper focuses on the exploration of the patterns of stylistic variation of this variable. The results of the analysis show the activation of the substandard variant [ʃ] related to contestual conditions which trigger the palatalization.