Vowel Elision in two Varieties of Spoken Italian is constrained by Morphology

Vowel Elision (VE)in spoken Italian has been mainly defined as obligatory with the masculine singular determiners LO the and UNO a , but as random with the other Function Words (Fnc). We will show that VE is a morphologically driven phonological process which depends on the morphological features realized by the Fnc final vowels in spoken Italian. It follows that LO and UNO are not the only two Fnc which undergo VE with regularity. Crucially, all the Fnc final vowels which are underspecified for number and case features tend to undergo VE with high frequence, in Florentine Italian (spoken in Tuscany, central Italy)as well as in Italian as spoken in Lecco (spoken in Lombardy, northern Italy). Our results will be interpreted in the framework of Optimality Theory together with the Co-phonology approach