This monograph investigates final vowel elision in spoken Italian. Specifically the book sheds
light on the functioning and the constraining factors of final vowel elision in sequences of
vowel-final determiners followed by vowel-initial nouns and in sequences of vowel-final
proclitics followed by vowel-initial lexical verbs. The analysis is based on «real» language
that is on corpus and elicited data as well as on their pooled results. The quantitative data
are analyzed statistically in order to identify the factors which constrain final vowel elision
(i.e. function word class the morphological category of number realized by the final elidable
vowel and speech style). The representation of final vowel elision in determiners and
proclitics proposed in this monograph relies on four theoretical constructs and on their
interaction i.e pre-compiled phrasal allomorphy dominant allomorphs lexically encoded
selectional preferences among allomorphs and prosodic rules.
