The stress system of Banawá, an endangered Arawan language spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, constitutes a puzzling case study for metrical phonology. It has been claimed that its metrical representations violate the Syllable Integrity Principle (1) (Buller, Buller, and Everett (BBE) 1993, Everett 1996, 1997), one of the core universal principles in standard metrical theory, which bans representations where a foot dissects a heavy syllable (e.g., *(CV.C

)(V.C
), *(C
.CV)(
.CV), where periods indicate syllable boundaries and parentheses, foot edges).

The underlying assumption of this principle is that syllables, and not morae, are the only possible stress-bearing units (Hayes 1995). An important prediction that arises from the alleged inviolable nature of (1) is that no language may display a contrast between identical heavy syllables with stress on the first mora (e.g., C

V) and stress on the second mora...

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