Extrametricality in Latin

It is generally claimed that all coda consonants in Latin are moraic and therefore contribute to the weight of a syllable. Contrary to that characterisation, however, I argue that word‐final [s] was always extrametrical – as were all consonants after long vowels. That claim accounts for a number of phonological patterns that are poorly understood. Those patterns range from vowel length alternations in words like sūs ‘swine .nom.sg ’ and suis ‘swine .gen.sg ’ to underapplied rhotacism in words like opus ‘work’, which resists the analogical shift from [s] to [r] that is found in words like honour (<  honōs ) ‘honour .nom.sg ’. In addition, extrametricality clarifies the idiosyncratic behaviour of word‐final [s] in Old Latin verse, in which the final syllable of a word like minus ‘less’ scans as light more often than it scans as heavy. Extrametrical consonants furthermore exhibit anomalous phonotactic patterns. For example, only word‐final [s] can create a coda with rising sonority. The resulting optimality theoretic analysis advances a detailed account of moraicity in Latin phonology and more generally informs our understanding of complex patterns in moraic structure that fall out from constraint interaction.