The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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Word Stress and the Metrical Foot Words are made up of rhythmic units called feet and these comprise one or more syllables. Feet represent the rhythmic structure of the word and are the units that allow us to describe stress patterns. In each foot, one of the syllables is more prominent or stronger than the other syllable(s) and it is called the strong syllable. It is the head of the syllable. The other syllables in the foot are the weak syllables. In “party”, the first syllable is strong and the second syllable is weak. There are two kinds of feet; left-dominant and right-dominant. Languages use either one or the other type. • Left-dominant feet have a strong first syllable with the following syllables weak. • Right-dominant feet have a strong final syllable with preceding syllables weak. English is a left-dominant language. For example, “consultation” has two feet, /kɔn.səl/ and /tæɪ.ʃən/. In each of these feet, the first or left-most syllable is strong and the second is weak, that is, leftdominant. In each word, one of the feet is stronger than the other feet. Its head is more prominent because it is assigned intonational tone or extra length. This strong syllable has primary word stress and the heads of the other feet have secondary stress. In “escalator” /eskəlæɪtə/, there are two left-dominant feet and the first has primary stress. The first syllable of the second foot carries secondary stress. The weak syllables are unstressed. In English there is a tendency for the first syllable of words to be strong and for words not to have adjacent strong syllables. For example, words like “lantern” (s w) and “halogen” (s w w) are far more common than “arise” (w s) or “apex” (s s). So within feet we can identify a distinction between strong and weak syllables, and within a word across feet we can identify primary, secondary stress and unstressed syllables. Metrical theory is principally concerned with the parameters that determine the position of stressed syllables in words. Stress is seen as a strength relationship between different syllables.
Building Feet into Words English Words are built from three types of feet. 1. binary (trochaic) containing a strong then a weak syllable, eg “elbow” 2. ternary containing a strong followed by two weak syllables, eg “oxygen” 3. non-branching containing a single strong syllable, eg “cat” Most words in English have one foot. Obviously all monosyllables are one-footed, but so are also the large majority of two syllable ('pattern') and three-syllable ('Pamela') and even many foursyllable words ('America'). However, many words also have two feet: for example, 'imagination', 'orthodox', 'altitude'. One of these feet is always stronger relative to the other and is marked Fs (strong foot) as opposed to Fw (weak foot). The strong foot always includes the primary stressed syllable while the other weak foot (or feet) includes the syllable(s) with secondary stress. In bipedal words, the order of the feet can be either Fs Fw (i.e., with the strong foot first): these include e.g. 'altitude' and 'orthodox') or they can be Fw Fs (e.g., 'chimpanzee', 'latex'; 'imagination'). There are a few long words with three or more feet: these always have the strongest foot as the last foot (e.g., 'reconciliation' which is Fw ('recon'), followed by Fw ('cili') followed by Fs (ation). There are more than a few words in English that begin with a weak syllable. Since feet are left-dominant, and since every foot has to begin with a strong syllable, this will mean that and word-initial weak syllable is unfooted (not associated with a foot). Examples of such initial weak syllables occur in e.g. the first syllable of 'America', 'medicinal', 'pedestrian'). Words can be built by combining sequentially the above feet, or indeed the feet with themselves. For example, we can have two binary feet ('imagination'), a ternary foot followed by a binary foot
Page 1 and 2: The Syllable and the Foot Topics Th
Page 3 and 4: • Sonority or prominence: this is
Page 5 and 6: get a good idea of what types of sy
Page 7 and 8: The Rhyme The rhyme is the vowel pl
Page 9 and 10: The Syllable and Phonotactic Constr
Page 11 and 12: If they conform to the sonority pro
Page 13 and 14: Finally, there are far fewer restri
Page 15 and 16: eg. /stremp/ in English is an accid
Page 17: The Foot and Word Stress Word Stres
Page 21 and 22: The foot is analogous to the bar in
Page 23 and 24: These (H) are non-final heavy rhyme
Page 25 and 26: (3) Associate any weak syllables wi
Page 27 and 28: The Foot and Word Stress Robert Man
Page 29: The Syllable and the Foot : Summary

The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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