The Lapse Constraint

In this paper we argue that the Ft-Binarity constraint (feet are disyllabic or bimoraic) familiar from the metrical parsing literature (McCarthy & Prince 1986, Hayes 1994) should be decomposed into two constraints: Min-2 and Lapse. Min-2 requires feet to have at least two syllables/moras and prevents feet from becoming too small. The Lapse constraint, in the spirit of its original proposal in Selkirk 1984, prevents feet from becoming too big; our particular formulation (following Green 1995) penalizes two successive unstressed syllables not separated by a foot boundary. We present three arguments for this form of the Lapse constraint. First, it permits a straightforward analysis of the three-syllable window effect found in Piraha where stress seeks out the most prominent syllable within the final three syllables of the word (Green 1995, based on Everett 1983, 1986). Second, Min-2 and Lapse provide an analysis for the stressed degenerate feet in languages such as Maranungku and Banawa (Everett 1993, 1995). Finally, we show that the Lapse constraint subsumes the core cases of ternary rhythm falling under Hayes (1994) "weak local parsing" algorithm.This is the authors' version of the paper that was presented at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Formal Linguistics Society of Mid-America in May 1995, Bloomington, IN