Syllabic repairs in Macedonian

This article investigates syllabic repairs in Macedonian. It is shown that disparate processes are united in the effort to achieve a single goal: the elimination of extrasyllabic (i.e., unsyllabified) consonants, which constitutes a classic instance of a phonological conspiracy. The conspiracy includes the syllabification of sonorants, a-insertion before rhotics, a-insertion before nasals, and schwa insertion. There are four points of theoretical interest in this article. First, it is argued that Derivational Optimality Theory needs to be modified by admitting an additional level of evaluation: the clitic phrase level. Second, the behavior of rhotics and nasals is different at the same level of derivation: rhotics become syllabic while nasals remain extrasyllabic. Third, Macedonian is a language with two epenthetic vowels, each of which can act as a default vowel, which appears to lead to a ranking paradox. Fourth, OT-CC cannot handle the Macedonian data and is hence inadequate.