Syntactic Gemination

Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian and some other Western Romance languages. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant after words of certain categories.

The phenomenon is variously referred to in the English language as word-initial gemination, phonosyntactic consonantal gemination, as well as under the native Italian terms: raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), raddoppiamento iniziale, rafforzamento iniziale (della consonante)

In standard Italian, syntactic doubling occurs after the following words (with exceptions described below):

• all stressed ("strong") monosyllables (monosillabi forti) and many unstressed ("weak") monosyllables: è, e, o, a, da, fra, che, se, ma, più, può, gru, gnu, re, blu, tre, ciò, sì, già, giù, là, lì, qua, qui, né, sci, tè
  • Example: Andiamo a casa, Let's go home
• all polysyllables stressed on the final vowel (this and the previous types are called oxytone words)
  • Example: Parigi è una città bellissima, Paris is a very beautiful city
• some paroxytone words (stress on the second last syllable): come, dove, qualche, sopra (sovra)
  • Example: Come va?, How are you?

Articles, clitic pronouns (mi, ti, lo, etc.) and various particles do not cause doubling.

The cases of doubling are commonly classified into "stress-induced doubling" and "lexical".

"Syntactic" means that gemination spans word boundaries, as opposed to the ordinary geminated consonants as e.g., in "grappa". The emergence of syntactic doubling has traditionally been explained by a diachronic phenomenon of the loss of terminal consonants in Italian during its evolution from the Latin language (e.g. ad->a, quid->qui, etc.), however more recent research also pays attention to synchronic aspects.

Syntactic doubling is standard native pronunciation in Tuscan, Central (both "stress-induced" and "lexical") and Southern Italy (only "lexical"), including Sicily and Corsica. In Northern Italian versions of standard Italian, including Sardinia, speakers have difficulty using it correctly, because this feature is neither present in their dialectal substratum nor shown by the spelling.

Syntactic doubling usually is not reflected in spelling, unless a new word is produced by the fusion of the two: "chi sa"-> chissà ("who knows" in the sense goodness knows). In phonetic transcription, e.g., in the Zingarelli dictionary, the words that lead to syntactic doubling have an asterisk appended; e.g., the preposition "a" is transcribed as /a*/.

Syntactic doubling is not part of the normal grammar programmes in Italian schools, so that people who dodn't have a specific training in phonetics (such as people who studied linguistics or attended courses in theatrical pronunciation) typically don't recognize it as a standard feature of the language. Because of this, many Italian speakers are persuaded that syntactic doubling is a pronunciation error typical of the centre and south of Italy, with the consequence that northern speakers don't even try to acquire this feature, and central-southern speakers try to avoid it when speaking in formal situations.