The metrical foot in Diyari

Abstract

One of the principal innovations of metrical stress theory is the claim that stress involves not merely a set of diacritics indicating the relative prominence of the syllables of a word but the construction of a constituent, the stress foot. As a constituent, the stress foot not only plays a role in the placement of stress but is also available to condition other phonological and morphological processes. Although the existence of the stress foot is now widely accepted and a variety of examples have been put forward showing the existence of such constituents and their role in processes other than stress placement, such examples are still not common, and languages in which the stress foot subserves a number of different processes are not well-attested.