The Iambic Law: Quantitative Adjustment in Typological Perspective

44 The Iambic – Trochaic Law Brett

In the development of metrical stress theory, several influential approaches (Hayes 1985, 1987, 1995; McCarthy and Prince 1986; Prince 1990) have employed the Iambic– Trochaic Law (ITL) to provide extralinguistic grounding for an account of the differences between iambic and trochaic stress systems (see also chapter 39: stress: phonotactic and phonetic evidence; chapter 40: the foot; chapter 41...

The Ergative System in Balochi from a Typological Perspective

For the Western Iranian languages the transition from the Old Iranian to the Middle-Iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. This loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. The consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. ...

Perception of rhythmic grouping: testing the iambic/trochaic law.

This study was designed to test the iambic/trochaic law, which claims that elements contrasting in duration naturally form rhythmic groupings with final prominence, whereas elements contrasting in intensity form groupings with initial prominence. It was also designed to evaluate whether the iambic/trochaic law describes general auditory biases, or whether rhythmic grouping is speech or language...

Morphological Complexity: a typological perspective

Japanese Pitch Accent in a Typological Perspective

Standard Tokyo Japanese has a rich pitch-accent system where multiple pitch patterns are differentiated from each other in terms of the presence/absence of an abrupt pitch fall as well as its position. However, this is only one type of system among the variety of pitch-accent systems found in the language. This paper looks at these pitch-accent systems from typological viewpoints, through a com...