Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

John wrote:

<<Someone on the Unicode mailing list has just pointed out that
fuccative-infixation[*] can only happen at a foot boundary, which is
why we can have inde@#$#pendent but not be@#$#hind.>>

Related to this specifically, there's a high school in Berkeley, CA that has
upwards of 4,000 students.   It actually represents its own speech community,
and has been studied by at least one linguist.  They have all kinds of
vocabulary words that don't seem to exist anywhere else (e.g., [p_hi.'dZa:~]--don't
ask me to spell it in English--which means "loser").   One very odd example is
the use of the fuccative-infix with the pronoun "me".   It comes out
sounding--to me, at least--like [m@fVk@ni:].   How about *that* for creative?

Responding to the rest:

Thank you very much.   This is *exactly* what I was looking for.   Come
spring break, I'm going to sit down with these and see what I can do with my
languages.   Thank you very much.

To Ray Brown:

If stress had nothing to do with pre-classical Latin, how does one explain
that word-final bi-, and even tri-moraic syllables don't get stressed?

To Shreyas:

"OT rules."

I wholeheartedly disagree, and I think Persig would, too.   ;)   Seriously,
though: Look out for Juliette Blevins's Evolutionary Phonology.   I'm really
excited about it.

-David

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