ii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Metrical and Prosodic Structure in Optimality Theory

This dissertation examines four components of a theory of metrical stress — the prosodic hierarchy, the system of prosodic prominence, the metrical grid, and the slope category sys-tem — and investigates how Optimality Theoretic constraints restrict or facilitate interaction between them. The proposal is comprehensive in that it examines each of the basic types of stress alternation — binary, ternary, and unbounded — both in weight-sensitive and weight-insensitive systems. The proposal’s focus, however, is the discrepancy between the wide range of binary patterns that standard accounts predict and the much smaller range of pat-terns that are actually attested. Of particular concern is the standard account’s over-generation of iambic patterns. In pursuit of greater restrictiveness, the proposed approach departs from the structural assumptions of current approaches in several ways. The pro-posed account insists on strict succession (or exhaustive parsing), tolerates improper brack-eting, makes violable the foot-stress relationship, and allows prosodic categories to share entries on the metrical grid. The proposal also departs from the standard account in the divi-sion of labor between symmetrical constraints, such as Alignment, and asymmetrical con-straints, such as NonFinality. Although Alignment still figures prominently in the propose