[Lingtyp] languages without feet?

[Adam James Ross Tallman]

Thanks everyone for your responses (Ian and David + private responders),

Great leads to look at!

Here's another question ... have there been any phonologists who have
proposed or assume that *all languages have feet*. I ask because I've had
reviewer questions and conference questions that seem to presuppose this to
be the case. I'd like to see the original arguments, if there are any.

best,

Adam







On Sat, May 6, 2023 at 7:20 AM Ian Maddieson <ianm at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
Post-doctoral Researcher
Friedrich Schiller Universität
Department of English Studies
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