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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.

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.

Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1980), pp. 238-249

Modeling the morphological structure of natural languages in terms of a nondeterministic finite-state automaton is shown to be inadequate in its handling of some common natural language phenomena. We show that a two-tape nondeterministic automaton is capable of handling these phenomena. The modeling is improved by the specification of a new type of automaton, the preset two-head automaton, which we argue is equivalent in expressive power to a linear context-free grammar. We discuss the operation of a parser which implements the improved model.