Latent feet in prosodic phonology

Abstract

Lee, Yongsung. 2008. Latent feet in prosodic phonology. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 14.3. 445-463. Not all foot-heads are stressed. Latent feet are the feet that do not have phonetic stress, though they have head elements. They surfaces when the constraint, FTHD=STRESS, is violated by being dominated by other related constraints such as PWD-PROM or NOCLASH. This interaction explains the absence of secondary stresses in Cairene Arabic, which crucially refers to maximally parsed foot structure for locating the primary stress. In Tiberian Hebrew, we see that secondary stresses show up on a selective basis. Secondary stress is assigned to the foot-heads which are not in the clash environments. The latent foot proposal, an OT extension of stressless feet, offers simpler and more consistent analysis of the lack of secondary stresses in Cairene Arabic and the selective presence of secondary stress in Tiberian Hebrew than previous related proposals. Further the same proposal can explain the selective absence of secondary stress in English. (Pusan University of Foreign Studies)