Speaker: Levi Driscoll
Title: Ludika: Playing with Feet
Time: Monday, March 11th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: We present a description and formal analysis of a novel English-based ludling called Ludika. Starting from clear cases with direct cues to foot structure, we argue that meaningless bits are affixed to the right edge of surface English feet in Ludika. We then use Ludika as a diagnostic of foot structure in more ambiguous contexts such as initial stressless light syllables (po‘tato). Evidence from Ludika aligns with Kiparsky’s (1979) characterization of these initial stressless syllables as unstressed degenerate feet, rather than syllables adjoined to feet in a recursive structure (Jensen 2000, Davis & Cho 2003, Kager 2012) or stray syllables (Ito & Mester 2009). We also leverage phrasal data to illustrate that function words in phrases behave just like feet elsewhere in Ludika, suggesting that they are neither stray syllables in phonological phrases (Selkirk 1996) nor syllables adjoined to content words as part of a recursive prosodic word structure.