Conditional blocking of long-distance consonant dissimilation is attested

Hansson (2007) demonstrated that, given an OT grammar with the constraint schemas CORRC↔C and IDENT-CC-x, factorial typology calls for grammars where certain segments are opaque to long-distance consonant assimilation (LDCA). That is, it is possible to rank CORR-C↔C and IDENT-CC-x constraints such that, for example, in a language with place harmony for sibilants, a voiced [z] will be transparent to the harmony of two affricates (/tS. . . z. . .dz/ → [tS. . . z. . .dZ]) but crucially will be opaque to the harmony of a fricative with an affricate (/tS. . . z. . . s/→ [tS. . . z. . . s]). This is known as conditional blocking. McCarthy (2010) argued against CORR-C↔C constraints on grounds of economy and typological prediction: he advocated a constraint MAX-CC, penalized for every segment in an output candidate that is not included in the CC-correspondence relation, and demonstrated that ABC effects can be modeled using only MAX-CC and the IDENT-CC-x constraint family, with the exception of conditional blocking. Since Hansson himself explicitly states that “[i]t remains to be seen whether any cases of LDCA exhibiting these particular kinds of blocking effects actually exist”, McCarthy claimed that the absence of examples was not by accident: conditional blocking is not found precisely because CORR-C↔C constraints are not part of CON. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate that the dissimilatory analog of conditional blocking is found in the behavior of the -āli/ārisuffix in Latin (the suffix reflected e.g in English lunar, legal, popular, floral), and that no account but one employing the mechanism of Agreement By Correspondence with conditional blocking is sufficient to model this behavior in OT. The handbooks tend to be vague on the subject of the conditions on -ālis/āris, stating only, for example, that -ālis dissimilates to -āris when there is an [l] in the stem it attaches to (see Meiser 1998: 127). The true descriptive conditions on -ālis/āris are as follows (Cser 2010):