The Loss of h and Compensatory Lengthening in Old English: An OT-CC Account

In Old English (OE), a voiceless fricative /x/ spelled with <h> deletes and results in compensatory lengthening (CL) of the preceding vowels in some environments. CL has often been treated as mora preservation (Hayes 1989). However, the moraic account of CL has been a great challenge to classic Optimality Theory (OT) which does not allow an intermediate representation (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince 1993, 1995). The goals of this study are to explore the loss of /x/ with CL in OE, to show how the OE data can be analyzed within the framework of OT-CC (candidate chains) (McCarthy 2006, 2007a, 2007b) and ultimately to indicate what advantages the proposed OT-CC account can have compared with the previous analyses. In this study, the interaction of Prec(Depμ, MaxC) and other constraints plays a crucial role in accounting for the opacity of CL in OE. Also, it is shown that the current analysis can easily integrate all the data including /x/-deletion with CL as well as /x/-deletion without CL under the same hierarchy of the constraints proposed.