Gemination in far south-east Piedmontese

There is a narrow area lying in far south-east Piedmont called Fraschetta, close to the limits of Piedmontese language area, non yet sufficiently studied, if not at all. It presents some really interesting feautures: one of them is consonant gemination. Gallo-italic dialect having gemination in their consonant sistem are considerably rare and, as far as I know, in none of them gemination is distinctive except in that of a small Swiss village, Soglio in Val Bregaglia, Graubünden. The dialect of Fraschetta it's likely to present a phonology where consonant lenght is not distinctive, but I don't dare say anything “official”, as I'm not writing on the results of a research. My studies until now are based on a little oral and written corpus and on my personal knowledge, being the Fraschetta variety my second native language. Gemination, together with other phonological changes, occurs in stress context. For instance (please note that the first vocal in the right coloumn is the clitic pronoun):

fyˈma eˈfømːa

to smoke he smokes

znja uˈzneijːa

to drown he drowns

tuˈka uˈtokːa

to touch he touches

suˈna iˈsoŋːnu

to sound they sounds

I do not have examples where gemination is not predictive; in fact, it occurs only within stressed syllables. However, let's see this couple:

*VOLIA(M)> voja *ILLE VŎCITAT> eˈvojːa

wish, desire pour off ǃ (imperat. 2^nd sing.)

The example above is, for now, the only I could find presenting opposition. Two points, however, rise up to attention: first, a single case is a too scarse element to build on it further conclusions; second, [voja] could be a recent lexical borrowing from Italian, since there in Fraschetta other “native” expressions for the same meaning are available, such as [qʷəjːa], although with little semantic difference. That means it could be a casual and recent opposition, not affecting the deep phonological structure. At the moment, I am not sure neither about the borrowing nor about the originality of the word. Considering that also a general rule of gemination is still missing, a research is strongly required.

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