The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for…

A distribution of the Italian definite articles "il" and "lo" is proposed that makes use of both Steriade's syllabification rules and a language-specific sonority hierarchy. The incorporation of these rules results in the generalization that the definite article "il" occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a consonant that is a member of…

Reviews the limited amount of research regarding ways in which primary stress is assigned to second conjugation infinitives in Italian and then proposes a new perspective taking into consideration root vowels, root-final consonants, syllable onset, monosyllabic vs. polysyllabic roots, and canonical form. (CB)