Syntactic Gemination
Word-initial consonants are geminated after certain vowel-final words in the same prosodic unit. The words that trigger this include unstressed some proclitic particles, paroxytone prepositions, monosyllabic words, and oxytonic polysyllabic words. For example, casa ('house') is pronounced but a casa ('homeward') is pronounced . This is not a purely phonological process, as the la in la casa ('the house') does not trigger this gemination: .
Read more about this topic: Italian Phonology
Famous quotes containing the word syntactic:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)