Symmetries and asymmetries in secondary stress patterns

A long-standing observation about the typology of Quantity-Insensitive binary stress systems is that patterns that appear to be based on trochaic feet are attested in a greater variety than patterns that appear to be based on iambic feet (Kager 1993; Hayes 1995; van de Vijver 1998; Hyde 2002; Alber 2005; among others). While this typological imbalance is typically discussed in terms of parsing directionality – directional parsing patterns found among trochaic systems are very often absent among iambic systems – we can gain a better understanding of the disparity by considering the patterns of attestation in mirror-image pairs. In mirror-image stress patterns, stressed and unstressed positions alternate in the same way, but the alternation starts from opposite edges. As examples, consider the mirror image pairs in (1a) and (1b). The (1a) pattern stresses every odd-numbered syllable from the left. Its mirror image, (1b), stresses every odd-numbered syllable from the right. Both patterns are attested. The (1a) pattern can be found in Maranungku (Tryon 1970) and the (1b) pattern in Suruwaha (Everett 1996). The patterns in (2) differ only slightly from those in (1). In (2a), stress appears on every odd-numbered syllable from the left except the final syllable, resulting in a lapse at the right edge in the odd-parity form. In the mirror image, (2b), stress appears on every odd-numbered syllable from the right except the initial syllable, resulting in a lapse at the left edge. However, only one of the patterns in this pair is actually attested. The (2a) pattern can be found in Pintupi (Hansen and Hansen 1969), but there appears to be no language that exhibits the (2b) pattern.