Architecture and Blocking

We discuss theoretical approaches to blocking effects, with particular emphasis on cases in which words appear to block phrases (and perhaps vice versa). These approaches share at least one intuition: that syntactic and semantic features create possible “cells” or slots in which particular items can appear, and that blocking occurs when one such cell is occupied by one form as opposed to another. Accounts of blocking differ along two primary dimensions: the size of the objects that compete with one another (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences); and whether or not ungrammatical forms are taken into consideration in determining the correct output (relatedly, whether otherwise well-formed objects are marked…