Rural Sociophonetics. Dialectology meets usage-based theory in the village of Antona (Massa, Italy)

Ideally, sociophonetics deals with controlled experimental settings and well-documented languages. This work strives to bring this discipline into the alleys and stone walls of Antona, a small Italian village in the Tuscan Apuan Alps. In this general milieu, dialects are standalone languages coexisting with Italian. Moreover, Italian dialects usually have very small, if any, written corpora. This situation adds extra layers of procedural complexity for sociophoneticians, who put great emphasis on word frequency distributions and their effects on patterns of production and perception. In this work, theoretical aspects of this example of “rural” sociophonetics are expounded from the point of view of the first acoustical analysis of two features of the Antonese dialect: geminate lateral retroflexion and voiceless plosive aspiration. Two experimental clusters are presented: a mixed-method protocol with descriptive intents and a usage-based pair of tests on the effects of the Italian cognate representations on the production of Antonese retroflexion and aspiration. Overall, this book promotes the combination of quantitative and qualitative mindsets in sociophonetic inquiries, as well as the expediency of subjective frequency estimation, entropy and bilingual frequency calculations in usage-based dialectological studies.