As we known, foot is a stress-related unit. But in Mandarin, the existence of stress remains controversial, so I would like to know the formation of foot in Mandarin Chinese. Thanks.
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Note that there is a Chinese language stackexchange here: chinese.stackexchange.com – jk - Reinstate Monica Mar 1 '16 at 9:59
Duanmu (2007) The phonology of Standard Chinese has an extensive analysis of Mandarin foot structure. The only way to fully answer your question is to cut and paste everything into a post, but in a nutshell, feet are trochaic, and he posits simultaneous syllabic and moraic feet, with no sub-minimal feet, and stressed syllables are obligatorily heavy. It also seems that he has "stress" as an independent property which interacts with foot formation (that is, he posits principles dictating that certain things must have stress – not that they must be the head of a foot – and then foot structure must somehow be built to satisfy stress / foot related conditions).
