In this article I consider arguments for the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) presented by McCarthy (1986). The version of the OCP proposed by McCarthy is that At the melodic level, adjacent identical elements are prohibited (p. 208). The controversy concerns how this principle is implemented and whether it is a universal. McCarthy claims that the OCP is a universal in nontonal phonology holding for underlying and derived representations and that a phenomenon termed Antigemination provides support for the OCP. Given the tonal arguments of Odden (1986) that the OCP is not universal, it would be surprising if the OCP were a formal universal in nontonal phonology but the residue of a language-learning problem in tonal phonology. The following claims will be important here:
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