Compensatory lengthening

1 A challenge for OT 1.1 Compensatory lengthening as weight conservation Compensatory lengthening occurs when the featural content of a nucleus or moraic coda is deleted, or becomes reaffiliated with a nonmoraic position — typically an onset — and the vacated mora, instead of being lost, is retained with new content (Hayes 1989). Compensatory lengthening is most often triggered by the deletion of a weight-bearing coda consonant. In ancient Greek, when an -sin coda position is lost, its mora survives as a lengthening of a neighboring segment — the preceding vowel in the majority of dialects, the following consonant in Lesbian and Thessalian: /es-mi/ ēmi, emmi ‘I am’ (cf. /es-ti/ esti ‘is’).