Rhythmus und Pausen in der Fremdsprache Deutsch

This paper deals with the prosodic items «rhythm» and «pauses» in relation with the acquisition of German by Italian natives. It discusses universal as well as language-speci c phonetic and pho- nologic aspects. Starting from the assumption that the basic elements that determine rhythm are syllables in syllable-timed languages and stress groups in stress-timed languages, speci c phonetic and phonologic aspects of German and Italian are attributed to rhythmic differences. Pauses are analysed by taking into consideration their function in spoken language, i.e. speci cally for speech organization. Both the contrastive aspects of German and Italian and the so-called «foreign ac- cent» of Italian learners of German are discussed. Finally, the paper gives some practical hints for phonetic training speci cally addressed to Italian learners of German.