Prosodic Repulsion in English and Cairene Arabic

Abstract

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of prosodic repulsion, a force of resistance between phonological entities that is proposed to account for several seemingly disparate and heretofore unconnected phonological phenomena across human languages. Three basic aspects of phonological structure (i.e. nonfinality in metrical structure, onsets in syllable structure and binarity in foot structure) are reconsidered through the lens of prosodic repulsion as an introduction, and it is demonstrated that each of these aspects of phonological structure can be understood as the result of resistance between an element of a prosodic constituent and an edge of that constituent. Two case studies are then presented in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which the concept of prosodic repulsion can be applied to the re-analysis of old problems. In the first of these, a constraint banning word-final strong morae is proposed to account for the disparity in English between words with final stressed bimoraic syllables such as kangaroo and words with final unstressed bimoraic syllables such as buffalo. In the second case study, a constraint banning word-final morae from being parsed into feet is proposed to account for the notoriously complex pattern of stress in Cairene Arabic. Both of the proposed constraints crucially involve the resistance of moraic elements to the edge of the prosodic word, representing a specific subtype of prosodic repulsion constraints that are referred to above as moraic resistance constraints.