PERSISTENCE OF THE LATIN ACCENT IN THE NOMINAL ...

planes or tiers greatly facilitate the treatment of long vowels, diphthongs, geminate consonants, d
tautosyllabic clusters. The interaction between planes is clear in the three dimensional
representation.
The metrical plane in Figure 1-12 marks all of the potential stress bearing elements with x
on the syllable tier while indicating the metrical feet with parentheses on the foot tier; the final
syllable, enclosed in angled brackets, is considered to be extrametrical and does not project a
foot. On this level only the head of each foot is marked with x. The word level tier indicates the
locus of primary stress. The one other foot on the foot tier, a left-head trochee, may be said to
carry a secondary stress corresponding to the initial syllable of the word.
σ σ σ σ
X X X X X X X X X X
X X X < X >
( X ) ( X ) < X >
( 'X )
bŏ nĭ tā tem
Syllable Plane
Skeletal Plane
Metrical Plane
Syllable
Foot
Word
Figure 1-12. Autosegmental representation of a prosodic word, Latin bŏnĭtātem, f., acc. sg.
Independence of the syllabic structure from the metrical grid is of critical importance as
Halle (1998, 543) notes in a retrospective on the accent of English words: “It was originally
thought that feet are made up of syllables, but subsequent work has shown this to be incorrect ...
It was therefore proposed in Halle and Vergnaud (1987) that feet are composed not of syllables,
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