Foot and Rhythmic Structure in Irabu Ryukyuan

Abstract

The aim of this study is to show that foot structure plays a key role in the organisation of the prosodic system of Irabu, a north-west variety of Miyako Ryukyuan, spoken in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. By introducing foot structure I give a natural explanation to two crucial features of Irabu prosody, i.e. bimoraic constituency and potential iterativity of prosodic features (High and Low tones). With this new approach, Irabu prosody will be shown to be characterised by a foot-based alternating rhythm of tone features, which is a typical manifestation of a cross-linguistically recurrent alternating rhythmic principle, or the Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (Selkirk 1984, Kubozono 1993).