| Abstract: | The process of stress assignment justifies creating metrical constituents. Reducing the ultimate effect of exhaustive footing to a mere counting tool breaches economy of representation. However, some derivational accounts require iterative footing to locate primary stress, even though no secondary stressing is attested. Using a rule as line conflation, the non-stressed feet are subsequently deleted. This derivation, nonetheless, is incompatible with OT that abstracts from serial processing. Thus, assuming a mono-foot account, for a number of bounded stress systems with no secondary stresses, requires adopting a different underlying principle. The notion of Parsability, that evaluates candidates for exhaustive footing, is introduced to achieve the crucial counting effect. The same rationale is extended to account for word-level headedness and directionality. The proposed mono-foot account is applied to a number of stress patterns like Cairene, Seminole/Creek, and Hindi. Disfavouring any redundant footing, constraint interaction nominates the proper sequence, in each pattern, for footing. |
