Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian

First Published in 2002. The Italian phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico or sometimes raddoppiamento fonosintattico has received a vast amount of attention. Long recognized in Italian grammar books the process consists of the gemination of a word-initial consonant in certain environments. The word raddoppiamento means “doubling” and it is deemed “syntactic” or “phonosyntactic” because the process spans word boundaries. This offers a synchronic and diachronic cross-dialectical study of this phenomenon.