Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2017
Bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses are rare and their existence has been recently called into question (Newlin-Łukowicz 2012). The present paper reports an acoustic study of secondary stress in Ukrainian based on polysyllabic words with lexical stress located at or near the right edge of the word. The results indicate that Ukrainian has an iteration of secondary stresses from the left edge towards the lexical stress, rather than in the opposite direction. This characteristic makes it metrically related to bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses (e.g. Polish), which invalidates the argument against such systems and proves the empirical adequacy of the metrical theories designed to account for these stress patterns.
We are grateful to three anonymous referees of Journal of Linguistics for suggestions and criticism which were helpful in improving the paper. Thanks are also due to the audience at the 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting, where the preliminary stage of the research was presented, for their comments and questions. We also wish to thank the Ukrainian speakers for participating in the experiments. Research was funded by National Science Centre (Poland), grant No. 2015/17/B/HS2/01455. All errors are ours.