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Some Spanish language games involve reordering the syllables of the words. However, the stressed syllable of the game word does not always match the stressed syllable in the original Spanish word and/or the position of the stress in the original Spanish word. Using game words found in different sources, a corpus of 261 words from different Spanish games was created to account for the games’ stress patterns. The metrical structure of the language games (e.g., Vesre, which is a game in Argentina and Uruguay) was analyzed. The results of the analysis suggest that the game words’ metrical structures are composed of quantity-sensitive, right-aligned trochee, in which the stress falls in penultimate position in vowel-final words, and consonant-final words generally have final stress, confirming previous proposals about the default metrical structure of Spanish (Harris, 1983; Núñez-Cedeño and Morales-Front, 1999). Overall, these Spanish language games illustrate The Emergence of The Unmarked (TETU) in metrical structure, providing evidence of Spanish stress assignment, whereby the unmarked stress pattern is a right-aligned quantity-sensitive trochee.

The Danish stød, a kind of glottal prosody associated with certain syllables, as in barʔn ‘child’ (cf. stødless barnlig ‘childish’), has long been the target of intense phonological investigation. In this paper, we show that its analysis requires an understanding of the prosodic constituent structure of Danish, and of the essential role of the perfect prosodic word (coextensive with one foot). After motivating this notion on independent grounds, both in other languages and in the context of acquisition, we show that the Danish stød system, analyzed in Optimality Theory, provides a window on the workings of the perfect prosodic word, regulating the presence and absence of stød in some of the much-discussed cases in the literature. In conclusion, we discuss the status of the perfect prosodic word in the light of recent developments in phonological theory, such as Match Theory.

In the English lexicon, laryngeal alternations in the plural (e.g. leaf ~ leaves) impact monosyllables more than finally stressed polysyllables. This is the opposite of what happens typologically, and would thereby run contrary to the predictions of INITIAL-SYLLABLE FAITHFULNESS. Despite the lexical pattern, in a wug test we found monosyllables to be impacted no more than finally stressed polysyllables were—a 'surfeit of the stimulus' effect, in which speakers fail to learn a statistical generalization present in the lexicon. We present two artificial-grammar experiments in which English speakers indeed manifest a universal bias for protecting monosyllables, and initial syllables more generally. The conclusion, therefore, is that speakers can exhibit spontaneous learning that goes directly against the evidence offered by the ambient language, a result we attribute to formal and substantive biases in phonological acquisition.

The meter of a poem is to its rhythm as a composed score is to its performance and also as a text is to its interpretation, whether one takes interpretation in its hermeneutic, written sense or in the sense of an experienced vocalization--whether, that is, one takes it into the library or into the auditorium, the literate domain or the oral. Now the practice of scansion, or prosodic textual markup, by its very nature participates in both these domains. As a visible notation of an imagined performative utterance, for which it serves concurrently as record and as guide, scansion both confesses and exposes that acoustic nostalgia which has inhabited the printed voice in its virtual orality ever since poems first fell from the air onto the page. Arguably since manuscript antiquity, and decidedly since the Renaissance inauguration of print, competent reading of verse has depended on a regular interplay between the visual and the aural mode (the latter nearly always entailing its homonym, the oral mode) of verbal experience. Scansion is a highly artificial technique that engages all three modes, really, but the first two especially. Here, Tucker examines the two musician monologues from Robert Browning's 1855 collection Men and Women: \"A Toccata of Galuppi's\" and \"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.\"

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

The paper addresses historical changes in the stress system of Hebrew, attending to the difference between Biblical Hebrew (script-based) and contemporary Hebrew (attested), and predicting the system of post-Hebrew; on the basis of experimental evidence and words from the periphery of the lexicon, it is predicted that the stress system of post-Hebrew will be similar to that of Biblical Hebrew. The predicted change from contemporary Hebrew to post-Hebrew is attributed to a combination of two factors: the inconsistency of the present system, and its incompliance with universal principles. The changes are addressed in terms of constraint reranking within the framework of Optimality Theory.

Many languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vowels are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, however. The source of the problem is classic OT's parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are potentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms.

This paper proposes a model of stress assignment in which metrical structure is built serially, one foot at a time, in a series of Optimality Theory (OT)-style evaluations. Iterative foot optimisation is made possible in the framework of Harmonic Serialism, which defines the path from an input to an output with a series of gradual changes in which each form improves harmony relative to a constraint ranking. Iterative foot optimisation makes the strong prediction that decisions about metrical structure are made locally, matching attested typology, while the standard theory of stress in parallel OT predicts in addition to local systems unattested stress systems with non-local interactions. The predictions of iterative foot optimisation and parallel OT are compared, focusing on the interactions of metrical parsing with syllable weight, vowel shortening and constraints on the edges of prosodic domains.