Word and Foot Minimality in English: A Metrical Government Analysis

Abstract

Possible foot inventories have been widely discussed in the literature (Hayes 1995; Halle and Vergnaud 1987; Burzio 1994, among others). While binary feet are generally accepted in all typologies, other foot types (unary, ternary, unbounded) have been subject to debate. In this paper we argue that unary feet are ill-formed due to their inability to support a contour tone. This prohibition is further reflected not only in word minimality requirements in English, i.e. the ban on light open monosyllables, but also in the absence of short vowels word-finally and the avoidance of final stress on light syllables. The acoustic analysis of monosyllabic CVC words shows that in isolated pronunciations the vowel is systematically lengthened in order to meet the tonally-driven foot minimality requirements. Thus, given the abundance of light monosyllabic words in the English lexicon, the word and foot minimality requirements must be treated as non-identical. These empirical observations will be formally captured by government relations that hold between nuclei. In particular, we will argue that minimal foot binarity follows from the fact that a full nucleus must always govern another nucleus to its right. A phonetic result of such internuclear government is the reduction of the latter. Thus, CV monosyllables are both lexically and metrically excluded; CVC monosyllables, on the other hand, are lexically possible since the full nucleus governs the final empty one. However, in order to meet the foot minimality requirement the nucleus must increase its duration to accommodate a contour tone (cf. Gordon 2000). The minimal word and foot requirements, therefore, differ in one aspect only, namely that the head nucleus in the minimal word needs a nuclear position to govern, whereas the head of the foot needs to govern a phonetically full nucleus.