The mora is a widely used and highly valuable tool for the analysis of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including but not limited to stress behavior, syllabification, templatic morphology, compensatory lengthening, and tone patterning. Moraic Phonology posits moraic representations in the underlying representations of segments. While the utilization of the mora allows for a
breadth of analyses of separate but related processes, the mora also conflates these processes by relating them each to the mora itself. This can be seen as a boon of the theory in that it connects phenomena previously thought unrelated. However, this leads to the challenging task of reconciling a larger set of incorrect predictions of the theory, including moraic mismatches in which
the moraicity of segments appears different for separate processes. In the time since Hayes (1986,1989) it has become clear that many phenomena that are analyzed using moras can be derived computationally – including via mora assignment/licensing (Crowhurst and Michael 2005; Gordon 2002; Hayes and Wilson 2008; Kiparsky 2003; Zec et al. 2003). This weakens the predictive power
of representational mora and assigns more power to computation (of mora assignment or otherwise), without interfering with the status of the mora as the locus of the myriad of different processes for which moras are considered relevant. The use of mora-assigning or mora-licensing processes in computational analyses reduces the strong predictive power of representational accounts, but still conflates many separate processes to be related to the unit itself. For this reason, I suggest a reexamination of the domains which are typically analyzed with moras in order to determine for which processes the mora is a necessary, and preferable tool of analysis. I propose that stress assignment
can be computed in a variety of languages without reference to moras or moraic representations. To show this, I build upon Crowhurst and Michael (2005) and Prince (1993) and present an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the stress patterns of several languages which have historically presented issues for moraic analyses, without utilizing moras.