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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2021) 52 (3): 473–518.
Published: 25 June 2021
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Despite their apparent simplicity, the structure of DPs containing “complement” CPs (what we will call DCs) has long been obscure. One major strand of investigation has attempted to assimilate DCs to (close) nominal apposition, implying that N and CP form a structural unit that then combines with D. Danish has two kinds of DCs, a bare DC with the superficial structure [D N CP] and a prepositional DC in which the CP is encased in a PP. Exploiting clues provided by the allomorphy of the definite morpheme, we argue that the bare and prepositional DCs have very different structures, neither of which can be assimilated to apposition between N and CP. We further show that the two kinds of DC have distinct semantic and pragmatic properties. We then argue that English also has two different structures for DCs, and that they are plausibly parallel to the structures we establish for Danish. We conclude by arguing that two distinct structures give rise to the “apposition” relation: in one case it is between coarguments of D and in the other it is nonrestrictive composition.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2018) 49 (1): 61–84.
Published: 01 January 2018
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Embick and Marantz (2008) present an analysis of the Danish definiteness alternation involving a postsyntactic rule of Local Dislocation (an operation 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; rather, it depends on the structural relation 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: the result of competition between Vocabulary items 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 Vocabulary items spelling out the morphemes.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2014) 45 (4): 617–653.
Published: 01 October 2014
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This article addresses a proposal by Katzir (2011) that licensors are crucially involved in definiteness and gender marking in Danish, Icelandic, and Greek. We identify several morphological patterns in Icelandic and Danish that are predicted to be impossible under Katzir’s theory and argue that these languages do not support the existence of licensors. Instead, we propose an account within the framework of Distributed Morphology, arguing that the patterns of gender and definiteness marking seen in these languages are the result of competition for insertion between well-motivated Vocabulary items. In a sense, then, we argue for a more traditional and theoretically simpler analysis of agreement in the languages.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2005) 36 (1): 85–125.
Published: 01 January 2005
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Embick and Noyer (2001) develop an analysis of definiteness marking in Danish and Swedish employing the central assumptions of Distributed Morphology (DM) together with the syntactic operation of head movement of N to D. We expose some theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the analysis and conclude that the assumption of N-to-D movement is incompatible with the central assumptions of DM. We further show how these shortcomings are avoided by the lexicalist analysis proposed by Hankamer and Mikkelsen (2002) and compare it with an alternative DM analysis that does not rely on head movement in the syntax. We conclude that while a lexicalist or a DM analysis is viable, with interesting trade-offs, neither of the viable analyses involves any movement.