Syntagmatic constraints on insertion

摘要

This paper argues that the availability of exponents for insertion is restricted not only by their morpho-syntactic feature specification but, in addition, by an accessibility relation holding within a marker inventory: The exponent inserted at step n constrains the set of exponents competing for insertion at step n+1. The proposal is applied to a number of phenomena that have previously been dealt with by stipulating designated post-syntactic operations that modify the syntactically determined feature sets before morphological exponence is determined. Apparent mismatches between syntactically motivated feature specifications and morphological exponence are treated as the result of the accessibility relation. The paper contains analyses of multiple exponence in Archi and Dumi, apparent feature insertion in Nimboran, and obligatory co-occurrence of exponents in Spanish clitics.