Vowel elision in spoken Italian

Italian vowel elision across word boundaries has been considered obligatory with the masculine singular determiners uno ‘a/an’, lo ‘the’ and quello ‘that’ in prevocalic context, but as unpredictable and subject to variation with the other function words. I will show that, in Florentine Italian, vowel elision is a morphologically driven phonological process which crucially depends on two factors: the morphological features realised by the word-final vowels together with the possibility of recovering them from the context after the application of vowel elision, as well as the function word type and its frequency of occurrence.