Overlap, Recursion, and Ternary Constructions

A number of advantages have been claimed in the recent literature for theories that allow recursive, or internally layered, feet (Bennett 2012, Kager 2012, Martínez-Paricio 2013). The claimed advantages lie in the ability of recursive feet to capture phenomena associated with ternary stress configurations, whether the patterns involve repeating ternary configurations, ternary configurations embedded in otherwise binary patterns, or the ternary configurations found in trisyllabic accent windows. For the most part, proponents of recursive feet have acknowledged the ability of overlapping feet (Hyde 2001, 2002, 2016) to capture the same types of phenomena. For example, Martínez-Paricio (2013) acknowledges the ability of overlapping feet to account for lengthening affects in Wargamay (Dixon 1981) and Yidiny (Dixon 1977a, b), as first demonstrated in Hyde (2002), and to account for patterns of Dutch vowel produce all known examples of trisyllabic accent windows. The claimed empirical advantages of recursive feet, then, are not really advantages at all. At least, they are not advantages over overlapping feet. Overlapping feet can cover the same empirical territory as that covered by recursive feet. As we shall see below, however, the reverse is not true. A number of phenomena that can be captured with overlapping feet cannot be captured with recursive feet. The two phenomena examined here are quantity-insensitive binary stress patterns and trisyllabic accent windows. As we shall see in Section 3, recursive feet cannot be employed to produce a reasonably accurate typology of quantity-insensitive binary stress patterns because they do not offer a way to address the Odd-Parity Input Problem (Hyde 2012b, 2016). As we shall see in Section 4, recursive feet cannot form the basis for a general account of accent windows, since they cannot account for accent windows where a secondary stress accompanies the accent within the window. The reason that overlapping feet can provide successful analyses in these situations, where recursive feet cannot, is that overlapping feet are able to represent a key class of ternary configurations that cannot be represented with recursive feet. Recursive feet cannot effectively account for quantity-insensitive binary stress patterns and trisyllabic accent windows simply because they cannot be used to represent the necessary ternary configurations. The paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 presents the six different ternary configurations that must be produced by any approach to metrical stress theory, and it illustrates some of the contexts in which these configurations can arise in the stress and accent patterns …