Structure, Architecture, and Blocking

Embick and Marantz (2008) present an analysis of the Danish Definiteness alternation involving a postsyntactic rule of Local Dislocation (an operation that is sensitive to linear adjacency but not hierarchical structure). Examination of a fuller range of data reveals that the alternation cannot be determined strictly in terms of adjacency, but rather depends on the structural relation (specifically, sisterhood) between the D and the N. We propose to treat the alternation as an instance of conditioned allomorphy, the suffixal form appearing when D is sister to a minimal N, and the free article elsewhere. This alternation is, then, a case of “blocking” in the sense accepted by Embick and Marantz (2008); the result of competition between VIs for the expression of a morpheme. Assuming that the condition for wordhood is being a complex head, we argue that the distinction between free and bound morphemes, and whether bound morphemes are prefixes or suffixes, must be encoded in the VIs spelling out the morphemes.