On Florentine stop weakening (gorgia) and its pervasiveness.

The project focuses on the pervasiveness of Florentine stop weakening taking two directions. ​ The main study focuses on the eventual spreading of spirantization in the strong contexts (post-consonantal and geminate) which were considered immune to the phenomenon and have been understudied. It provides a fine acoustic analysis based on more than 10,000 tokens produced by 40 speakers combined with a sociolinguistic analysis adopting a variationist approach. The study evidences that the phenomenon is quite stable but it seems to be greater among the yoing generation and some cases of weakening have been founf out of the intervocalic context. They appear to be sociolinguistically marked.​ The hypothesis is that this general weakening might be related to a specific voice quality. The side study observes spirantization pervasiveness, analysing the adoption of the feature by 29 speakers who migrated to Florence from Campania, Calabria and Lombardy. Results indicated that spirantization can be adopted by these speakers, especially if they declare to identify with Florence, if they think it is still the norm, and under some specific sociolinguistic conditions.