Starting in the late 1970s, metrical theories of stress have become a central research area in phonology. The stress systems of hundreds of languages have shown that feet come in trochees (Dum di) and iambs (di Dum), and that heavy syllables often interfere with those patterns, a phenomenon known as quantity-sensitivity. We will survey major developments in the field since 1980 and consider some current issues including stressless, ternary, recursive and quality sensitive feet.

Day 1. Metrical theory of stress (Hayes 1995, Kager 2007, Gordon 2010)

Day 2. Syllabic trochees (Alber 2005, Gordon 2002)

Day 3

• Moraic  trochees (Hayes 1995, Mester 1994)
• Weight-to-Stress (Prince & Smolensky 1993)
• Mixed systems (Alber 1997)

Day 4

• Iambs (Kager 1993, Graf & Ussishkin 2003, Altshuler 2009)
• Recursive feet (Martinez-Paricio & Kager 2016)

Day 5

• Stressless feet (Golston 2017)
• Cairene Arabic (Crowhurst 1996)
• Japanese (Poser 1990)
• Quality sensitive feet (Kenstowicz 1997/2004)

Reading

Alber, Birget (2005). Clash, Lapse and Directionality. NLLT 23, 485–542 

Alber, Birgit (1997). Quantity sensitivity as the result of constraint interaction. HIL Phonology Papers, 1-45.

Altshuler, Daniel (2009). Quantity insensitive iambs in Osage. IJAL 75.3, 365-398.

Crowhurst, Megan J. (1996). An optimal alternative to conflation. Phonology 13.3, 409-424.

Golston, Chris (2017). Pyrrhic feet. OCP 14. Düsseldorf, Germany.

Gordon, Matthew (2002). A factorial typology of quantity insensitive stress, 2002, NLLT 20, 491-552.

Graf, Dafna, & Adam Ussishkin (2003). Emergent iambs: stress in Modern Hebrew. Lingua 113:239-270.

Hayes, Bruce (1995) Metrical stress theory. University of Chicago.

Kager, René (1993). Alternatives to the Iambic-Trochaic Law. NLLT 11, 381-432.

Kager, René (2007) Feet and metrical stress. The Cambridge handbook of phonology, 195-227.

Kenstowicz, Michael (1997/2004). Quality‐sensitive stress. In John J. McCarthy (ed.), Optimality theory in phonology: a reader. Blackwell.

Martinez-Paricio, Violeta & René Kager (2016). The binary-to-ternary rhythmic continuum in stress typology: Layered feet and non-intervention constraints. Phonology 32.3, 459-504.

Mester, Armin (1994). The quantitative trochee in Latin. NLLT 12, 1-61.

Poser, William J. (1990). Evidence for foot structure in Japanese. Language 66.1, 78-105.