The unbearable lightness of being high: Openness as structure and the consequences for prosody

Abstract

GP 2.0, a further development of Government Phonology (GP), assumes that certain properties which have so far been assumed to be melodic are better understood as structural. This includes the element A, responsible (amongst other things) for the representation of aperture in vowels. This paper argues that such a reinterpretation of aperture also sheds light on the prosodic properties of vowels, in particular what counts as metrically heavy or light.