Nasal Loss and Compensatory Lengthening in Old English

In prehistoric Old English (OE), nasal loss before a homorganic fricative results in compensatory lengthening (CL) of the preceding vowels, some of which are subject to raising. Traditionally, CL is treated as mora preservation (Hayes 1989): CL takes place to preserve a mora that belongs to the deleted coda consonant. CL represents a case of counterbleeding opacity, which has been a great challenge to classic Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1995). The goals of this study are 1) to explore nasal loss with CL including vowel quality change in OE and 2) to show how the OE data can be analyzed within the framework of OT-CC (candidate chains) (McCarthy 2006, 2007ab). In this study, it is proposed that the condition on GEN banning stray elements should apply only to the terminal link in a candidate chain, whereby nasal loss with CL in OE can be accounted for without recourse to a counter-intuitive mora-sharing structure (Shaw 2008). Also, it is shown that the OT-CC analysis of CL in OE allows us to incorporate some of the insights of derivational approaches and to analyze the OE data regardless of moraicity of a coda consonant in the input.