Evidence for foot structure in Japanese

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.