Moraic Trochee Research Articles

Franconian tones fare better as tones than as feet: a reply to Köhnlein (2016)

Köhnlein (2016) proposes to represent the Franconian tone contrast as a difference in foot structure, whereby Accent 1 appears in lexically marked syllabic trochees and Accent 2 in default moraic trochees, as an alternative to analyses with an underlying privative tone for Accent 2. After sketching the two approaches, we argue against three arguments Köhnlein advances in favour of the metrical analysis. We then show that one of the disadvantages incurred by the metrically derived tonal representations is the introduction of a novel and otherwise unsupported concept of a single tone that incorporates two morphologically different but phonologically identical tones. We also evaluate Köhnlein's (2018) more recent proposal to use the syllabic trochee to account for subtractive plurals in tonal dialects. Finally, we compare the predictive powers of the metrical and tonal analyses of the Arzbach dialect.

Enclitic-induced stress shift in Catalan

In this paper we provide a novel and unified formal analysis of the stress microvariation found in verb–enclitic groupings in Barcelona Catalan, with stress stability, in Formentera Catalan, with stress shift to the penultimate and the last syllable of the whole sequence, and in Mallorca and Menorca Catalan, with stress shift to the last syllable. We argue that stress shift in Formentera Catalan conforms directly to the unmarked pattern of nominal stress in Catalan, that is, a right-aligned moraic trochee, with the constraintAll-Feet-Rightundominated, leading to final and penultimate stress. In Barcelona Catalan, the effects of this constraint are inhibited by an anti-alignment constraint prohibiting the right edge of a foot from coinciding with the right edge of a clitic. In Mallorca and Menorca Catalan, stress shift is also understood as a strategy to meet the unmarked nominal stress pattern of Catalan, although in these dialects the anti-alignment constraint is also undominated, leading to catalexis, in this case a melodically empty mora, and thus to final stress.

Stress and Gemination in Alor-Pantar Languages: Revising Heston (2016)

This squib highlights difficulties with the reconstruction of a system of stress based on moraic trochees in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar recently presented by Heston. Examination of a wider set of data from the Alor-Pantar languages shows that there are numerous etyma whose synchronic behavior in terms of consonant gemination and stress placement cannot be accounted for by the proposed system. Instead, it is necessary to recognize the presence of phonemic stress placement at least in ProtoAlor-Pantar and likely in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar.

Stress in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar

The roughly thirty non-Austronesian languages spoken on the islands of Timor, Alor, and Pantar have long been assumed to be related, but their relationship was rigorously demonstrated only recently. Substantial strides have been made in recent years toward understanding the history of this language family, though so far, determining the origin of the Western Pantar synchronically phonemic geminate stops has proven to be a challenge. No independent evidence for reconstructing geminates has been put forward, but there is also no obvious conditioning environment for gemination. The present article demonstrates that positing a system of stress based on moraic trochees in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar allows an accurate statement of the environment of gemination in Western Pantar, as well as explaining several independent characteristics of the vowels and prosody of the daughter languages.

Thomas Campion’s iambic and quantitative Sapphic: Further evidence for phonological weight in Elizabethan English quantitative and non-quantitative meters

Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the ‘quantitative movement’, Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion’s scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English; (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole; (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of ‘position’, as described by William Lily and John Colet’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels; and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a means of avoiding pyrrhic syllable combinations that resulted in non-maximal filling of long positions in a line of English iambic pentameter. His two iambic pentameters – the ‘pure’ and the ‘licentiate’ – are both accentual and quantitative meters that, in accordance with moraic theory, integrate stress and strength with syllable weight. He contrasted stress and weight in the quantitative Sapphic lyric ‘Come let us sound with melodie’ (Campion, 1601). Hanson’s (2001, 2006) reconsideration of the role of syllable quantity in Elizabethan metrical theory and Elizabethan poetry should be continued.

Prosodically conditioned morphological change: preservation vs loss in Early English prefixes

This article explores the motivations behind the loss of a number of Germanic prefixes in the history of English. Using Old and Middle English translations of Boethius’ de Consolatione Philosophiae as a corpus, it is shown that prefix loss is not specific to a single word category, nor to the presence of morphosyntactic characteristics such as prefix separability. This state of affairs cannot be explained by current theories of prefix loss, which are generally restricted to inseparable verbal prefixes. The fact that some prefixes are lost and some are preserved, also argues against an across-the-board grammaticalisation account, based mostly on semantic factors. It is held here that a closer look at the prosodic structure of native prefixes can provide a principled explanation for the entirety of our data. To this effect, the optimisation of a resolved moraic trochee (Dresher & Lahiri, 1991) amid significant restructuring of the language's lexicon had crucial impact on the fate of prefixed words. In particular, Early Middle English would have come to prefer maximal, branching feet, and avoid words with prefixes constituting heavy, non-branching feet. Ultimately, the preservation of prosodic structure led to the loss of heavy monosyllabic prefixes due to stress clash between prefix and root. Light monosyllabic and bisyllabic prefixes, in contrast, were preserved, since no clash occurred. This argument explains the changes in prefixation from a purely prosodic standpoint, hence accounting for the data for both verbal and nominal prefixes, which were heretofore dealt with separately.

Optimality Theoretic Representation of Stress in Cairene Arabic

Stress pattern of Cairene Arabic (CA) has played a major role in the development of stress placement theory. Syllable weight plays a role, however, the weight to stress principle does not always apply. Bimodality of a foot is very important and is largely addressed in the literature. Stress in CA is described in the literature as Moraic Trochee, but primary stress is on one of the three leftmost syllables. Many studies investigated primary stress in CA. These studies employed different theoretic formulations based on the segmental rules, the metrical phonological tree, and the metrical phonological grid. Notwithstanding, no recent study has translated the findings of the aforementioned literature into an Optimality Theoretic Constraints framework. The present paper attempts to accomplish this feat. The paper also presents a new set of data based on CA spoken language.

The Relevance of Metrical Information in Early Prosodic Word Acquisition: A Comparison of Catalan and Spanish

This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven Catalan-speaking children reveal that maximality constraints are active at two stages, namely, the moraic trochee stage, and the bisyllabic foot stage. One of the noteworthy differences between Catalan and Spanish is the rate of acquisition of weak initial syllables in WS words, as Catalan learners omit initial syllables in WS target iambs for a significantly longer time than Spanish learners, despite the fact that Catalan is a language where the bisyllabic iambic WS pattern is more frequent than in Spanish. We claim that this asymmetry in the course of development of PWs can be attributed to the frequency of exposure to different metrical models. In Catalan (and also in English), the high frequency of CVC structures boosts the availability of the moraic trochee in initial stages. Thus the data provide crucial evidence that children at early stages of PW production are especially sensitive to the frequency distribution of foot structure in the input. In general, the behavior of Catalan PW acquisition significantly supports the idea that the course of PW development is strongly influenced by language-specific distributions of prosodic structures (especially feet) in the target language (see Demuth, 1996a, 2001a, 2003; Lleó, 2002; Prieto, Bosch-Baliarda, and Saceda-Ulloa, 2005; and Zamuner, Gerken, and Hammond, 2004, among others).

A IMPORTÂNCIA DA QUANTIDADE SILÁBICA EM LATIM: POEMAS DE HORÁCIO E MARCIAL

The aim of this paper is to analyse the behavior of enclitic stress in lexical words increasedwith the enclitic -que in Latin. We will present some notions about Latin accent, associated to theidea that the weight of the syllables is fundamental to the enclitic stress. Contrasting this theory tothe collected corpus in Horacios’s and Marcial’s poems, we perceive that, applying the theory ofmetrical phonology, it is possible to analyse the padrons of stress making use of two different patternsof metrical feet: moraic trochee and uneven trochee.

Quantitative meter in English: the lesson of Sir Philip Sidney

The Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter in English pose a long-standing puzzle: not only have their specific principles of composition proved elusive; so has any more general explanation of their ultimate failure. This article argues that the solution to the puzzle lies in interactions of quantity and stress in both the meter and the language. An analysis of the dactylic hexameter as based on moraic trochees explains why stress is more straightforwardly accommodated by some positions than others. Analyses of stress-induced ambiguities in English syllable quantity such as the resyllabification of intervocalic consonants in C[V acute]C[V times over] contexts explain apparent inconsistencies in scansion. When these complexities are taken into account, Sidney's compositions reveal themselves to be systematic and phonologically well founded; ambiguities are acknowledged and the meter is exploited to structure them. Ultimately, however, such ambiguities mean that quantity alone provides an inadequate basis for meter in English, because it underdetermines the metrical possibilities.

METRICAL STRUCTURE AND TONE: EVIDENCE FROM MANDARIN AND SHANGHAI*

A well-known problem in Chinese phonology is that in some dialects most regular syllables keep their underlying tones, but in others the initial syllable determines the tonal pattern of a multisyllabic domain. Mandarin and Shanghai, two of the most studied dialects, best represent the contrast. Duanmu (1993) proposes that the two dialects differ in syllable structure but otherwise obey the same phonological constraints, including moraic trochee. However, a number of problems remain, such as questions regarding the metrical counting units, the predicted weight of a syllable and its phonetic duration, the economy of underlying tones, the mechanism of tone deletion, and the relation between weight and stress. This article offers a solution to the problems. The main proposal is that Chinese is both mora-counting and syllable-counting, in that a heavy syllable forms a bimoraic trochee, which I call M-foot, yet a minimal word must be a disyllabic trochee, which I call S-foot. In addition, both Mandarin and Shanghai are subject to tonal polarity, which is independently found in African languages. I also discuss the implication of the S-foot for metrical theory and other consequences of the present analysis.

O percurso histórico da acentuação em português através da análise do ritmo das cantigas de amigo

This work aims to outline the historical route of Portuguese stress, through the analysis of three cmcial points in the language temporal continuum: LATIN, ARCHAIC PORTUGUESE, anel BRAzmAN PORTUGUESE. TIle emphasis is given to the description of the Archaic Portuguese stress attribution process, anel the corpus is constituteel by aU the cantigas ele amigo· of the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, composeel between the enel of the XIIth century anel the beginning of the XIVth century. The theoretical framework adopteel here comes from the conceptions of parametric change - following Lightfoat (1991) - anel af nanlinear phonology - specially Hayes' (1991) metrical theory anel Mohanan's (1986) lexical theory. The analysis shows that aU these three perioels of the language adopt the sarne rhythmic basic foot (the moraic trochee) - anel the sarne choice referring to the setting of aU other rhythmic parameters vaue. The only exception is the value of the extrametrical constituent parameter. We concluele that there is no change in the. stress mie from Latin to Brazilian Portuguese. The changes verified in the extrametrical constituent parameter value setting are, in fact, consequence of a major linguistic change, not in the formulation of the stress rule itself, but in the moelule of its application (from postlexical to lexical component), in the Grammar, and in its elomain of application.