No stress system requires recursive feet

No stress system requires recursive feet

A recursive foot is one in which a foot is embedded inside another foot of the same type: e.g., iambic (_iaσ(_iaσσ́)) or trochaic (_tr(_trσ́σ)σ). Recent work has used such feet to model stress systems with full or partial ternary rhythm, in which stress falls on every third syllable or mora. I show here that no stress system requires recursive feet, that phonological processes in such languages likely don’t either, and that the notion of recursive foot is theoretically suspect.

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