Center and periphery in phonologya: ‘stress-test’ for two Ligurian dialects

In this paper, we investigate the phonetic realization of vowel length in two related non-standard Romance varieties, the Ligurian dialects of Genoa (Genoese) and Porto Maurizio (Portorino, as representative of the Western Ligurian type). These varieties, albeit very similar, are usually said to differ in the implementation of vowel length, which seems more robustly attested in Genoese and appears to gradually fade along the Western coast of the region. Our analysis relies on two production tests, which also permit to investigate the effect of the utterance-final position and discourse focalization on the phonetic realization of vowel length. The results show that short and long vowels significantly differ in all the examined contexts and in both dialects. Moreover, the utterance-final position and focalization have a significant lengthening effect in Genoese and Portorino; however, their patterns, as expected, are quite different from each other. Furthermore, the phonological constraints on vowel length imposed by pre-pausal lengthening differ in the two dialects. Finally, although we can infer from the two experiments that the status of vowel length in the two varieties is relatively stable, we observed a tendency for vowel length contrasts to be easily outranked by other intervening factors as a primary cue for distinguishing various sub-minimal pairs