Pronunciation Italian: raddoppjaˈmento sinˈtattiko
In English: syntactic doubling. A feature of Central and Southern varieties of Italian which involves the gemination of word-initial consonants. This is triggered by the characteristics of the preceding word. The triggers are a rather disparate set, but include words stressed on the final syllable and some, but not all, monosyllables. A couple of examples: città bella tʃitˈta ˈbbella (“beautiful city”), da Carlo da ˈkkaɾlo (“at Carlo’s place”). The geminate consonant is not normally recorded in the standard orthography, except in a small number of forms where a phrase has been lexicalised into a single word. For example, chissà = chi + sà = “who knows?” = “goodness knows”.