Dep: Beyond Epenthesis

Abstract

The correspondence-theoretic constraint Dep (McCarthy and Prince 1995) is often informally described as a constraint against epenthesis. While Dep does militate against epenthesis in input-output mappings, it has a more technical sense when applied to other domains, such as base-reduplicant correspondence and output-output correspondence. The goal of this squib is to show that Dep constraints do more than block epenthesis. In the domain of base-reduplicant correspondence, the high ranking of Dep-BR can result in underapplication of deletion, as in the case of Tonkawa. In the domain of output-output correspondence, DepOO is known to require overapplication of deletion in paradigmatically related forms. All of these effects follow from McCarthy and Prince’s definition of Dep as a family of faithfulness constraints that require a match between two strings that stand in correspondence. This discussion sheds light on a long-standing ambiguity in classic Optimality Theory: does the treatment of epenthesis really require a faithfulness constraint, or is markedness sufficient? On the face of it, epenthesis is an unfaithful mapping, and as such should violate faithfulness. As Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004) and McCarthy and Prince (1993) point out, however, epenthesis typically compounds markedness violations, as well—for example, if a candidate contains an epenthetic [h], it incurs one more violation of the constraint against the feature [spread glottis] than candidates without [h]-epenthesis. If we follow Prince and Smolensky (1993/2004), McCarthy and Prince (1993), and Zoll (1996) in assuming that