Rhythm and feet in Belhare morphology

Abstract

In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem ‘augments’ is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) “Principle of Metrical Coherence” and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of Crowhurst’s (1994) “Tautomorphemic Foot” constraint. The data also support a view of the Prosodic Hierarchy as weakly layered, allo Show more