[Lingtyp] languages without feet?

[Ian Maddieson]

Hi all,

There must be many languages in which the concept of a foot is not found to be relevant
(see Sun-Ah Jun’s chapter "Prosodic Typology: By Prominence Type, Word prosody, and Macro-rhythm" in 
Prosodic Typology II (edited by Sun-Ah) for some discussion. The notion of a foot does not seem to
useful for (standard)  French, Korean, Yorùbá, among many others, though it can be pressed into service
in languages such as Thai and Mandarin. Since it’s an abstract notion, I’m not sure what phonetic
data would be capable of providing direct evidence either for or against the notion of a foot, though
if for example, vowel length was considered important in foot construction, data could confirm the
presence of greater length where it’s presence had been invoked to justify foot structure.

Ian

> On May 5, 2023, at 09:16, Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> In Caroline Féry's excellent Prosodic Structure and Intonation, she describes a class of "phrase languages", identified as languages whereby there isn't much going on at the level of the prosodic word. 
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had *described* explicitly a language where the same thing could be said of feet (neither iambic or trochaic)? Or perhaps even more radically, not just that the feet don't do much, but that they aren't there at all?
> 
> Perhaps there's lots  of cases where feet haven't been proposed, are there any cases where they had been proposed, but then further research (perhaps some phonetic study) found that there was no evidence for them?
> 
> best,
> 
> Adam
> 
> -- 
> Adam J.R. Tallman
> Post-doctoral Researcher 
> Friedrich Schiller Universität
> Department of English Studies
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Ian Maddieson

Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
MSC03-2130
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001




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