Compensatory lengthening in Harmonic Serialism

This article aims to overcome the limitations of classical analyses of compensatory lengthening in Middle English and offer a viable alternative solution, where deletion of the coda consonant and subsequent vowel lengthening constitute separate steps in derivation. The basis of our analysis is that Hayes (1989)’ analysis fails to capture the universal nature of the phenomenon. Also, it is noted that the principle of unmarked one-to-one mapping between tiers is violated in his theoretical framework. I make a critical review of Torres-Tamarit’s (2016) account for compensatory lengthening in Harmonic Serialism. That mechanism turns out not to be satisfying in that its first step of the derivation starts with a structure that should not be allowed to undergo vowel lengthening at all, and this point had already been called into attention by Hayes. Besides, Torres-Tamarit’s analysis can be further reduced by the elimination of debuccalisation. Staying under the framework of Harmonic Serialism, I provide a new universal constraint responsible for assigning different indexes to segments when they belong to different syllables. This markedness constraint of universal nature will be instrumental in our analysis of compensatory lengthening throughout this article. We bring to light more examples from Latin illuminating the workings of this new constraint on compensatory lengthening.