2.1.2. Foot
A foot is a prosodic unit that covers combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is quite understudied for sign languages, and, as is also the case for some of the higher prosodic levels, it is uncertain what the characteristics of it are for NGT. Many signs are mono- or disyllabic in NGT, making the level of the foot overlap with the sign as a whole. Two authors describe two patterns in NGT – namely stress patterns in polysyllabic signs, and the frequent appearance of sentence-final indexical signs – for which they propose to use the level of the foot in the explanation of these patterns, but they also indicate that the evidence for the existence of this prosodic level in NGT is scarce. Since stress levels in mono- and disyllabic signs overlap with stress patterns in signs, we decided to describe these in PHONOLOGY 2.2.1.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant Agreement No 693349.