The present study investigates the role of sociolinguistic factors, such as language choice, speaker’s education level, and speech formality in the selection of boundary tones (BT) in yes-no questions in Neapolitan (ND) and Neapolitan Italian (NI). While the focus is on sociolinguistic variation, phonological factors potentially impacting prosodic patterns are likewise accounted for. We considered two groups of informants with university education vs. technical-professional education. Results show that L% is the default BT in ND, while H% is never selected in the examined sample. In NI, both H% and L% occur in each speaker group. BT selection in NI is influenced by the number of unstressed syllables before the boundary but not by the preceding pitch accent. Education level had no significant effect, whereas speech style played a key role: H% was less frequent in dialogues than in prompted and read speech. The selection of H% in NI in more formal contexts can be interpreted in the light of the notion of “hyper-distancing”, i.e. the speakers tend to avoid L% in more formal contexts to distance themselves from the dialect. As a typical dialectal feature, L% may in effect act as a social and stylistic indicator.
Leo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.