Emergent iambs: stress in Modern Hebrew § Dafna Graf a, *, Adam Ussishkin b a Institute for Language and Information, Heinrich-Heine-University of Du ¨sseldorf, Du ¨sseldorf, Germany b Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, AZ, USA Received 6 November 2001; received in revised form 3 January 2002; accepted 17 June 2002 Abstract A comprehensive analysis of stress in nouns and verbs in Modern Hebrew has eluded metrical phonologists for some time. This is most likely due to the fact that on the surface, Modern Hebrew appears to employ quantity-insensitive iambic feet. By contrast, developing the typology offeetinModernHebrewappearstoresultinsyllabictrocheesforthepurposeofsecondarystress assignment. Here, we propose a metrical constraint hierarchy that generates the correct footing for forms of any number of syllables and assigns main stress on a final syllable and secondary stress on alternating syllables to the left. No foot-type is explicitly demanded by any constraint; iambic structure is not imposed through any specific constraint on foot form, but rather emerges as the result of the interaction between constraints on prosodic structure. Additional compli- cations arise in the verbal system, in which main stress is no longer necessarily final. In our ana- lysis, we adopt the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince, Alan, Smolensky, Paul, 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Ms, Rutgers University and University of Colorado, Boulder). We provide an OT account of these facts, connecting them to the well-known observation regarding the relation between the seemingly irregular verbal stress pattern and a pattern of vowel deletion. We argue that the Modern Hebrew metrical system does not make any explicit reference to particular foot types. Our proposal also accounts for rhythmic secondary stress. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis that successfully accounts for Modern Lingua 113 (2002) 239–270 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua 0024-3841/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0024-3841(02)00087-6 § We wish to thank the faculty at the Heinrich-Heine-Universita¨ t Du¨ sseldorf for their help and support during the time this research took place, especially Janet Grijzenhout and Dieter Wunderlich. Many thanks as well to Outi Bat-El for her extremely valuable questions, criticism, comments, and support. Additionally, we would like to express our gratitude to Adamantios Gafos, John McCarthy, and Ora Schwarzwald for their questions and comments on various presentations of this work. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-211-81-15295; fax: +49-211-81-11325. E-mail addresses: grafd@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de (D. Graf), ussishki@email.arizona.edu (A. Ussishkin).