Abstract
The article focuses on some intonational features of three Romance languages spoken in northern Sardinia (Algherese Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and the Sardinian regional variety of Italian). The first part of the article shows, by means of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, that the above-mentioned languages share some intonational features that are not present in the dialects of Catalan and Italian spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula, respectively. In the following sections the article puts forward a diachronic explanation for this intonational convergence, basing on the role of Sardinian as a substrate language for both Algherese Catalan and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The final part of the article proposes a generalization of the findings of the case-study and puts forward a diachronic model of prosodic transfer that includes the mechanisms of direct transfer, fusion, and accommodation.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
