On the Palatalization of /s/ + Consonant in some Dialects of Middle and Southern Italy. In: (eds): D'Alessandro R., Pescarini D., Advances in Italian dialectology. Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars, Leiden, Brill, pp. 109-120.

Book chapter in a volume opening the series "Grammars and Sketches of the World’s Language", subseries "Romance languages". Many Italian dialects display an apparently chaotic and fragmented kind of palatalization of /s/ plus consonant. This chaos can, however, be ordered and reduced to an overall scheme, based upon the distinction between clusters of the type /st/ and clusters of the type /sp sk/. The phonological mechanism of the distinction between the various types of palatalization cannot be satisfactorily explained inside a purely articulatory framework, but an alternative view is proposable which makes use of the acoustic feature [grave] in order to explain the more general and abstract partition between the second segments of the affected clusters, namely /t/ vs /p k/