Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Tristan McLeay wrote:

>On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Pavel Iosad wrote:
>
>
>
>>Is as good an exmple of PM's binarity principle as any, since it
>>prohibits words of less than a foot, thus CV words are impossible (with
>>a few exceptions, such as discourse words, such as Russian _da_ 'yes').
>>The minimal word is CVC in a language which doesn't distinguish length
>>and CVC or CV: in a length-sensitive language.
>>
>>
>
>Hm, interesting, I wasn't aware of this. So it's a universal?
>
>
In Optimality Theory, a set of universal *constraints* mandate that the
ends of a word coincide with the ends of a metrical foot. (this means it
is bad if a word has a foot break in it or is too small to fill a foot.)
But other constraints (like one that maintains length contrasts) can
force violations of the foot-alignment if they are ranked correctly.

OT rules.

--
Shippo, have you shown this embarassingly familiar picture book to
anyone else?
Shreyas