This book aims to close the gap in the offer of textbooks focusing on the phonetic structure of Italian. The scholar strives to provide a complex description of contemporary standard and neutral Italian pronunciation, taking also into account the main "regional” variations and pointing out important differences with Czech phonetics.
This books covers all of the principal areas of the phonetic description of a language, including the sound system (consonants, vowels, central approximants, vowel length, phonological relevance of sounds in standard and neutral Italian), the production of consonant and vowel groups (hiatuses, diphtongs, gemination, spontaneous gemination of consonants, and syllabic structure), suprasegmental aspects (accent, sentence stress, and intonation) and sandhi phenomena (photosyntactic duplication, elision, and apocope). It pays special attention to the relation between the morphological structure of words and the position of stress.
Phonetics of Italian is intended for Czech linguists, language professionals (including teachers and interpreters). It is also useful for university students of Italian studies, who up to now lacked the availability of adequate material in Czech.