Lexical stresses in Macedonian and Polish

In this paper, we argue that the distribution of lexical stresses under affixation follows from the architecture of metrical theory. In particular, we show that the distribution of lexical stresses in Macedonian and Polish and their behaviour under affixation can be accounted for straightforwardly by adopting revised obligatory-branching feet (henceforth ROB feet). These are feet where the head must dominate a heavy or accented syllable, and the non-head is free to dominate any kind of syllable (Hammond 1986). These facts cannot be accounted for uniformly under a theory without such a footing mechanism, e.g. that presented in Halle & Vergnaud (1987). The organisation of this paper is as follows. First, we outline a simplified version of the theory proposed by Halle & Vergnaud. We go on to show how it deals with exceptional stresses in Macedonian and Polish. It is shown that this theory is descriptively inadequate. The ROB theory is then outlined and an analysis of Macedonian and Polish is presented that is superior to the previous analysis.