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Evidence for foot structure in Japanese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

William J. Poser
William J. Poser*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305
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Abstract

Proposals for foot structure in Japanese have hitherto been limited to versification and to mechanisms for assigning tone that bear little resemblance to stress feet. This is not surprising, since the metrical foot has thus far been associated with stress, which Japanese appears to lack. I argue here that a bimoraic foot whose properties are similar to those of stress feet in other languages plays a significant role in Japanese morphophonology. The existence of such feet in Japanese has a number of implications, the most important of which is that it suggests that in Japanese a rhythmic system like that underlying many stress systems may coexist with the independent pitch accent system.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 78 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This paper is the revised text of a talk presented at the University of California at Berkeley on 15 April 1987. The material on hypocoristic formation was first presented at the IAP Workshop on Japanese Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 January 1983, and subsequently at the Third West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz on 16 March 1984. I am grateful to Lynn Ohira for bringing to my attention several examples of hypocoristics with orthographically derived melodies, to Osamu Fujimura for telling me of his sister's unusual hypocoristic and for drawing my attention to the process of geisha/bargirl client name formation, to Koichi Tateishi (personal communication, 1988) for providing additional information on the secret language described in Tateishi (1985), to Kiyoko Masunaga for checking the geisha/bargirl client names with an additional consultant, to consultants too numerous to name, and to three anonymous referees.

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