Mora

Mora is a unit of syllable weight in moraic theory. Moras are the units to which metrical structure may refer.

Example

long vowels are often considered to be bimoraic, while short ones are monomoraic. This would explain the difference in behaviour with respect to stress-rules between these two classes of vowels in quantity-sensitive languages (see Quantity-(in)sensitivity).

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Hyman, L. 1985. A theory of phonological weight, Foris, Dordrecht.
• McCarthy, J. and A. Prince 1986. Prosodic Morphology, ms. Univ. of Massachusetts, Brandeis Univ.
• Prince, A. 1983. Relating to the Grid, Linguistic Inquiry 14, pp.19-100
• Van der Hulst 1984. Syllable structure and stress in Dutch, Foris, Dordrecht.