Prosodic Changes and Metrical Restructuring: Syllables, Feet, and Prosodic Templates

Theoretical developments in synchronic phonology have shown the impact of prosodic and metrical structure on sound and accent patterns cross‐linguistically. Historical linguistics has adapted these theoretical insights to account for a wide variety of seemingly disparate (morpho‐)phonological changes. This chapter explores phenomena which have been shown to be influenced by prosodic and metrical structure. It begins with syllable structure changes before moving up the prosodic hierarchy to discuss prosodic and metrical changes, focusing especially on accent placement and factors impacting the parsing of syllables into feet, as well as subsequent assignment of primary stress. The chapter next examines the role of the foot beyond stress in accounting for vocalic and consonantal developments that cannot be explained by the syllable alone. Before concluding, the foot's role as a prosodic template is introduced to show how these templates can account for both changes in sound patterns and morphological processes. Since most of the research exploring prosodic change, especially syllabic and foot‐based changes, has to date focused primarily on Indo‐European languages, especially Germanic and Romance languages, the examples in this chapter reflect this language focus, with an invitation to examine prosodic change in more language families.