Blurb:

In one of the pioneering works of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), McCarthy (1993a) offers a comprehensiveanalysis of r-insertion in non-rhotic dialects of English, and suggests that the constraint driving the process is not an onset-related constraint, but rather a constraint requiring prosodic words to end in a consonant (‘FINAL-C’). While morphological categories such as roots or stems are sometimes subject to templatic requirements involving an obligatory final consonant, independent evidence for a requirement of this kind on genuine prosodic constituents, such as surface prosodic words, is sparse. This paper shows that, while McCarthy’s treatment remains, in its essentials, a model of optimality-theoretic analysis, it is unnecessary to take recourse to FINAL-C once the onset requirements for different levels of the prosodic hierarchy, together with their associated faithfulness properties, are better understood.