ABSTRACT
The mora is relatively abstract property of syllables. Syllables themselves are not exhaustively parsed into moras – rather, the mora measures the weight of a syllable. A light syllable is associated with or contains one mora, a heavy syllable two moras, and analyses have been suggested where syllables of greater weight. The other major theoretical defect of the Prague mora is its essentially diacritic nature – nonuniversal rules map syllables onto particular moraic configurations. Syllable structure is identical in all relevant respects in the dialects, super heavy syllables receive stress by the same mechanism. The basic characteristic of the main stress rule is formation of a single binary branch, labeled s-w, over the rhymes of the last two syllables if the second of them is vocalic. The syllable gaining the stress must contain a long vowel, though it may be either closed or open.
