Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 05:20  PM, 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?
Binarity seems to be universal, but I don't think that Pavel is correct
in stating that languages without a length distinction have CVC as the
minimal word. Many native languages of Australia have no length
distinctions and the minimal word seems to be two syllables.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie