Foot Harmony and Quantitative Adjustments

• Main Author: Bakovic, Eric
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: No Publisher Supplied 1996
• Subjects: Hayes; Lawrence Island; McCarthy; central alaskan yupik; St Lawrence Island; Yupik
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7282/t33b61tx; https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/46155/

Foot structure can affect syllable weight, as is well known from the analysis of minimal word effects (McCarthy & Prince 1986, 1993ab, 1994 inter alia). Other examples of lengthening or shortening processes that are sensitive to foot structure (henceforth, quantitative adjustments) are quite common as well. In Yupik, for instance, LL sequences lengthen when footed iambically to become (L H'). This process, known as iambic lengthening, is one of the cornerstone pieces of evidence for what I will here call "the standard theory" of foot typology, as exemplified by Hayes 1985, 1987, 1995 and McCarthy & Prince 1986.(1) Iambic lengthening/qayani/ --> [(qaya':)(ni)] 'his own kayak'The standard theory takes the asymmetric (L H') iamb to be the perfect iamb, and iambic lengthening is taken to be a rule that strives for this ideal. In Hayes 1995, iambic asymmetry is built into the universal foot inventory in accordance with the Iambic/Trochaic Law, which states that iambic groupings naturally contrast in duration while trochaic groupings naturally contrast in intensity. Without further elaboration, this type of approach cannot account for dialectal variation in the quantitative adjustment of LH sequences in Yupik. One dialect, Chaplinski, behaves as expected: LH sequences are not adjusted and are footed as (L H'), as shown in (2a). Another dialect, St. Lawrence Island, foots LH sequences as (L S'), as shown in (2b). Finally, Central Alaskan Yupik dialects unexpectedly foot LH sequences as (H')(H'), as shown in (2c).(2) Quantitative adjustments of LHa. /qaya:ni/ --> [(qaya':)(ni)] 'in his kayak'b. /qaya:ni/ --> [(qaya'::)(ni)] 'in his kayak'c. /qaya:ni/ --> [(qa'y)(ya':)(ni)] 'in his kayak'To account more uniformly for all of the quantitative adjustments in (1) and (2), I adopt a slightly modified version of the theory of foot typology proposed in Prince 1990, recast within Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993).