Vowel Fusion and Antigemination in Guere and Mau

Three major articles on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) were recently published in LI. McCarthy (1986) and Yip (1988) claim that the OCP is the cause of a number of apparently unrelated phonological processes. Odden (1988) contests the basic idea that the OCP plays such a widespread role in individual grammars. Based on a number of counterexamples to antigemination, an OCP effect defined below, Odden argues against the universality of the OCP. In this paper, we examine data having the formal characteristics of some of Odden's counterexamples and show how they can be reconciled with a universal OCP