Superfeet as Recursion

In Prosodic Phonology Theory (Selkirk 1981, 1984, Nespor & Vogel 1986, Hayes 1989), the particular hierarchical organization of a set of universally available prosodic constituents (σ, ω, φ, etc.) captures the rhythmic patterns of languages and the domain of application of a wide variety of phonological processes. Rather than targeting isolated segments or arbitrary groups of segments within the phonological string, the assignment of lexical and post-lexical stress/tone, as well as the conditions/properties of certain phonological and morphophonological processes (e.g. fortition, deletion, truncation, reduplication...) are best modeled by directly referring to a small set of innate prosodic constituents and the universal way in which they are structured. Detailed research in certain prosodic systems has, however, significantly weakened the strong hypothesis of a universal Prosodic Hierarchy (PH) since language-particular categories have been claimed to exist in individual languages. A reasonable solution to this challenge has been explored in recent research by Ito & Mester (2007a,b, 2009a,b, 2010, to appear). In particular, these authors have shown that the fixed number of universal prosodic primitives can still be maintained if the structural possibilities of the hierarchy are enlarged. Building on research on prosodic recursion (Nespor & Vogel 1986, Ladd 1986, 1996, Gussenhoven 1991, Wagner 2005, Truckenbrodt 1999), Ito & Mester propose that additional layers in the PH may arise through recursion, namely, through adjunction. Within this proposal, just as syntactic categories present minimal and maximal projections, prosodic constituents above the prosodic word can exhibit minimal and maximal projections via prosodic recursion. Thus, by exploiting this recursion-building-mechanism, the universality and restrictiveness of the PH is preserved. For instance, by allowing prosodic word-recursion (see 1) and permitting the reference of phonological processes to the minimal and maximal projections of the prosodic word, Ito & Mester accurately predict several phonological phenomena in Japanese, English and German, without introducing new categories to the hierarchy, as opposed to previous analyses.