The prosodic structure of Burmese: a constraint-based approach Antony Green*1 Introduction

Antony Green*¹

1. Introduction

In the rest of section 1 I give the inventory of Burmese surface phones—vowels, tones, and consonants. In section 2 I discuss major and minor syllables. In section 3 I argue that the foot in Burmese is a single heavy syllable, not the iamb proposed by Bennett (1994) for Thai and by Griffith (1991) for Cambodian. In section 4 I discuss the prosodic word (PrWd) with especial attention to compounds and superlong words. In section 5 I discuss the maximum size of prosodic categories and propose a family of constraints called Unarity to limit the size of any prosodic category to exactly one of the next lower prosodic category. Finally, in section 6 I present other constraints necessa­ry to account for the prosodic behavior of Burmese.