n. [Italian: ‘syntactic doubling’] The phenomenon in Italian by which, in certain grammatical circumstances, a word-initial consonant is pronounced long: Maria è più alda che mai ‘Maria is hotter than ever’; Mario ha...

Syntactic doubling is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian and some other Italo-Western languages. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant after words of certain categories. The phenomenon is variously referred to in...