[Lingtyp] languages without feet?

[Kirsten]

Hi Adam and everyone else,

The Strict Layer Hypothesis assumes that foot structure —as for other
prosodic domains — is present in all languages. I get the impression,
however, that the lack of evidence or foot structure in many languages
hasn't been problematised in the same way as for the syllable and word -
e.g. Hyman's analysis of Gokana, Sheiring et al's re: Vietnamese (one
exception is Özçelik 2017's paper The Foot is not an obligatory constituent
of the Prosodic Hierarchy: “stress” in Turkish, French and child English).

Anyway, underlying much of the discussion here is ultimately the question
of what constitutes evidence for foot structure, and what is the
relationship between foot structure and stress. I think there's good
reasons not to treat stress as evidence for foot structure (you can account
for stress without foot structure, and empirical evidence for stress both
complex and lacking for many languages). This issue is the focus of my
current paper in Linguistic typology, and is discussed in more detail in my
forthcoming PhD thesis.

All the best,
Kirsten


On Sat, 6 May 2023 at 11:21, Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>
wrote:

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing list
>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>
>>
>> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
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