Issues in foot typology

Abstract

In this article I discuss one of the central concerns of metrical theory: the inventory of feet. Firstly, I will look into the question as to whether feet are even or uneven (section 2). Secondly, I will examine in section 3, in the spirit of van der Vijver (1995), whether the foot inventory can be reduced to trochaic feet, taking into account ternary systems in section 4. I conclude that certain systems simply are iambic and I propose in section 5 that they can perhaps be derived but using iambic prosodic words, rather than iambic feet. Having studied these issues from the viewpoint of standard metrical theory, I will then investigate the consequences of the theory advanced in van der Hulst 91984, 1992, 1996, 1997) and van der Hulst & Kooji (1994) in section 6. This theory claims that the treatment of primary accent and rhythmic structure should be formally separated. I will argue that if this theory is accepted some obstacles to the reduced trochaic foot inventory disappear. Then, following van der Hulst (ms.) and van der Hulst & Rowicka (1997), I will argue that the claim of separating primary and rhythmic accent should be reformulated as the claim that we must separate lexical from post-lexical prosodic structure. Finally, section 7 summarizes the main points of this article.