The tune-text-temporal synergy: Prosodic effects of final segmental weakening in Neapolitan

This paper investigates how tune, text, and duration interact to shape intonational form-meaning relations, focusing on Neapolitan final segmental weakening/deletion as a source of tonal crowding. To capture the dynamic co-variation of f0 and duration within the pitch-accented vowel, we implement a Generalized Additive Mixed Models–based modeling strategy. Results reveal a clear split between statements and yes–no questions: final segment retention is significantly associated with yes–no questions, whereas statements systematically show partial or total final deletion. Additionally, accented vowel duration increases monotonically with segmental loss. Crucially, duration-induced tonal adjustments vary with retention degree. In statements, deletion of a single segment primarily triggers phonetic readjustments (steeper f0 slope), whereas the deletion of the entire final syllable additionally yields undershooting and alignment shift as a part of a compression strategy; when partial deletion takes place in yes-no questions, either truncation or compression may be realized. Overall, Neapolitan resolves tonal crowding through variable, retention degree-dependent strategies by combining duration changes with tonal reorganization. Finally, we show that textual manipulations can function as non-tonal cues contributing to the robust encoding of tonal categories and help maintain contrasts across categories.