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Antepenultimate rhyme in Spanish and Greek as a window to metrically weak positions
De Sisto,Mirella Martinez-Paricio,Violeta Topintzi,Nina
De Sisto,Mirella
Martinez-Paricio,Violeta
Topintzi,Nina
Abstract
Meter and rhyme in poetry have often been used as diagnostics for phonological structure. In this contribution, we investigate how rhyme can provide insights into prosodic foot constituency. In particular, we show that rhyme patterns involving words with antepenultimate stress in Spanish and Greek poetry constitute evidence for internally layered ternary feet, based on an asymmetry that arises between unstressed post-tonic medial vs. unstressed word-final syllables: the former can be ignored in antepenultimate-stressed word rhyming, while the latter play a prominent role in rhyme. With a layered foot, this can be attributed to the fact that the post- tonic medial syllable is weaker because it has a double foot-dependent status, while the final syllable is dominated by only one foot projection. We support our claim with new empirical data from both languages by combining quantitative (for Spanish poetry) and qualitative (for Greek poetry) approaches. This article adds to the body of research discussing internally layered ternary feet in Spanish; additionally, by proposing the presence of this structure in Greek, we are able to provide a unified account of independent phenomena occurring in the language.
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2025-07
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glossa-18411-de_sisto.pdf
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prosodic foot, Greek phonology, rhyme, ternary feet, Spanish phonology
Citation
De Sisto, M, Martinez-Paricio, V & Topintzi, N 2025, 'Antepenultimate rhyme in Spanish and Greek as a window to metrically weak positions', Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1-41. https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18411
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess