No Stress System Requires Recursive Feet

A recursive foot is one in which a embedded inside another of the same type: e.g., iambic (iaσ(iaσσ́)) or trochaic (tr(trσ́σ)σ). Recent work has used such feet to model stress systems with full partial ternary rhythm, falls on every third syllable mora. I show here that no system requires feet, phonological processes languages likely don’t either, and notion theoretically suspect.