The Syllable and the Foot : Summary - Speech Resource Pages

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