surface violations of the OCP. A lively debate continued between John McCarthy and David Odden for several years, with each adding an extra 'anti-' to the title of the previous article of the other - e.g. "Anti anti-gemination and the OCP" , a reply to . Debate In Optimality Theory (OT) (), the OCP has been again redefined as a violable constraint. Yet many issues as to its precise formal character remain: (i) locality - what is the domain of the OCP (i.e. strict adjacency? etc.) and how is the domain represented in the theory; (ii) near-identical sequences - many languages show an OCP-like resistance to sequences of segments that differ in just one distinctive feature; is this the effect of the OCP, some other constraint? If the latter, how is this constraint formally related to the OCP; (iii) status as an OT constraint - is the OCP a single constraint, or is it the local self-conjunction of markedness constraints (Alderete 1997)? These and other issues related to the OCP continue to be hotly debated in phonological theory. Meeussen's Rule A particular instance of the OCP is Meeussen's Rule , named after the Belgian Bantu specialist A. E. Meeussen, which has been used to explain how a sequence HH tones becomes HL in various Bantu languages. References . . . PhD dissertation, MIT. . In Aronoff, M. & Oehrle, R (eds.), Language Sound Structure, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT. . Scanned 2MB Searchable 5MB . PhD dissertation, MIT. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club. . PhD dissertation, MIT. . . . . . . PhD dissertation, MIT. . External links Obligatory Contour Principle Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle IDEALS Obligatory contour principle effects and violations: The case of Setswana verbal tone Phonology