ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines the existence and roles of the syllable and the foot in the prosodic phonology of the Fuzhou dialect. On the one hand, I demonstrate that the syllable serves as a domain of rule application in the Fuzhou dialect, since the FA rule, as a well-formedness condition on the combination of alternating finals and tones, applies within but not across the syllable boundary. On the other hand, I argue against the foot as a domain of rule application in Fuzhou, although it has been proposed in some previous studies as the domain of application for rules such as TS and FC. It is shown in this chapter that no independent evidence for the existence of stress and foot can be found in the Fuzhou dialect, and the application of Fuzhou phonological rules does not refer to the foot domain, either at the lexical level or the phrasal level. Based on these observations, I propose to exclude the foot from the prosodic hierarchy of the Fuzhou dialect.
