The phonology of epenthetic stops: Implications for the phonetics-phonology interface in optimality theory

This paper presents an OT analysis of stop epenthesis, which as well as reflecting the basic pattern of stop insertion can also model the available quantitative data on variability of stop epenthesis and the phonetic difference between epenthetic and underlying stops. However, accounting for these factors requires the introduction of two very powerful mechanisms within OT, absolute ranking with noise added to rankings at evaluation time (Boersma 1998), and allowing the phonetic realization access to the underlying representation. Such a powerful theory may not be desirable, but this need for very powerful mechanisms to model quantitative data is probably not restricted to OT. Using this example, this article examines the relationship between phonetics and phonology in OT.