Compensatory Lengthening via Mora Preservation in OT-CC: Theory and Predictions

Abstract

Unlike 'classic' OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC) (McCarthy 2007) allows an account of compensatory lengthening via mora preservation, as in Hayes (1989). The OT-CC constraint ranking that permits compenstory lengthening makes a novel prediction about the rime structure of languages that exhibit these alternations. The OT-CC analysis presented here predicts both that VC rimes will be bi-moraic, as in Hayes (1989), and that the second mora of these rimes will be shared between the syllable nucelus and the syllable coda, a novel prediction of OT-CC. If shared moras distribute phonetic duration across segments (as argued by Broselow et. al. 1997), this prediction links the formal analysis of compensatory lengthening in OT-CC to the typologically rare phenomenon of closed syllable lengthening.