Syllable Weight and the Phonetics/Phonology Interface

Syllable Weight

Gradient syllable weight and weight universals in quantitative metrics*

Homeric Greek, Kalevala Finnish, Old Norse andMiddle Tamil are all languages in which weight is claimed to be exclusively binary in the poetic metrics. As I demonstrate through corpus studies of these traditions, the poets were sensitive to additional grades of weight, such that finely articulated continua of syllable weight can be inferred from distributional asymmetries in the metres. Across ...

Syllable weight and segmental durations in Finnish

At least four factors have been shown to have a reliable effect on segmental durations in Finnish (apart from such global effects as speech tempo and position within the utterance). The best known and most obvious of these factors is the quantity opposition, separately for vowels and consonants (and independently of word stress). Finnish thus has words like taka, taaka, takka, taakka, takaa, ta...

Weight-by-Position Adjunction and Syllable Structure

Most cross-linguistic variation in weight criteria is attributed to the parameterized application of Weight-by-Position adjunction to codas on a language-specific basis (Hayes 1989). This paper explores the hypothesis that coda weight is ultimately predictable from syllable structure. An extensive survey of quantity-sensitive stress systems shows that languages that allow a proportionately larg...

Syllable Weight, Stress Patterns and Nativisation

This paper looks at stress assignation for unknown foreign words read aloud by Scottish subjects. The syllable structure and syllable weight of the written words is examined, to determine where stress is most likely to be placed according to English stress rules, and the stress rules for the languages of origin of the words are also described. The stress patterns in the spoken responses are the...