Since prosodic units were introduced as a point of reference in sound change, Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] in Gothic has been examined in terms of the syllable or the foot. However, such prosodic studies fail to capture the empirical fact that Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] is consistently manifested only in the masculine ja-stem nouns and ja-stem verbs in Gothic. Furthermore, to account for the alternation, these studies rely on exceptional syllabification (Murray and Vennemann 1983), problematic foot parsing (Dresher and Lahiri 1991), or unmotivated abstract rules (Calabrese 1994), among other devices.