Evidencia fonológica para los pies métricos trisilábicos

This article examines the linguistic properties of a metrical foot, the phonological category between the prosodic word and the syllable, required to account for the patterns of stress and other phonological phenomena in the languages of the world. Despite the traditional assumption that feet are maximally disyllabic, in this paper it is argued that feet can sometimes be maximally trisyllabic, as long as they arise by adjoining a weak syllable to another foot. To sustain our hypothesis, different linguistic arguments and data will be presented, among others: (i) a puzzling pattern of vowel lengthening in two Australian languages, (iii) the distribution of aspirated and unaspirated stops in English and (iii) the stress patterns in Chugach Alutiiq. Beyond the account of ternary rhythmic stress, these metrical structures will be argued to be useful representations that provide a suitable account for differences between types of strong and week syllables, reported in some languages.