IMPLICATIONS OF THE DANISH DEFINITENESS ALTERNATION FOR CONCORD IN NANOSYNTAX

Abstract

The Danish definiteness alternation presents two challenges for Nanosyntax. First, it displays structural allomorphy of the definiteness marker between a suffix and prenominal article; second, there is concord between the definiteness marker and noun gender. I show that Nanosyntax can address both issues, explaining the suffix-article alternation by virtue of its spellout algorithm and the lexical overlap between suffix and article. This account provides a deeper explanation for the structural allomorphy than the Distributed Morphology analysis proposed by Hankamer & Mikkelsen (2018). The existing proposal for concord in Nanosyntax (Caha, 2019) cannot handle this combination of gender concord and allomorphy, so I propose a simple copying mechanism which handles concord more flexibly. This new proposal, however, is substantially less restrictive than Caha’s framework, paving the way for future work to balance restrictiveness with empirical coverage of prefix/suffix alternations and concord across languages.