Institute of Phonetic Sciences,
University of Amsterdam,
Proceedings 22 (1998), 21-45

PostScript version

RTF version

Though seemingly a good candidate for a universal output-oriented constraint, the OCP does not occur as a constraint in the production grammar. Instead, it handles, in interaction with the No-Crossing Constraint, the correspondence between acoustic cues and perceptual feature values in the perception grammar. Because faithfulness constraints use the perception grammar to evaluate the similarity between the perceptual specification and the perceptual output in the production grammar, the OCP does influence the evaluation of candidates in the production grammar. As a result, adjacent identical elements are avoided because they constitute PARSE violations. Dissimilation at a distance, by contrast, is due to a constraint against the repetition of articulatory gestures.

In this paper and in Boersma 1998a, I point out the advantages of distinguishing between articulatory and perceptual features in autosegmental phonology. According to McCarthy (1988), the only phonological processes that can be accepted as primitives in autosegmental phonology, are spreading, deletion, and the obligatory contour principle (OCP). While Boersma 1998a centres on spreading, the current paper will tackle the OCP.

McCarthy (1986) expresses the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) in its naked form as follows:

“adjacent identical elements are forbidden”

As we will see, many phenomena have been ascribed to this principle.