Blocking of Phrasal Constructions by Lexical Items

Abstract

Blocking is the widely observed phenomenon where the existence of one form prevents the creation and use of another form that would otherwise be expected to occur. Perhaps the most prominent cases are those in which the existence of an irregular form prevents the corresponding regular form from being used. In English for example, the existence of the irregular plural men for man is said to block the regular form *mans. Since the inception of the idea (Paul 1896), and in virtually all work on morphology over the past sesquidecennium, blocking has been taken to be restricted to the word-formation component (Esau 1973, Arono# 1976, Allen 1978, Clark & Clark 1979, Toman 1980, Zwanenburg 1981). Cases of non-lexical blocking are not cited as examples of the phenomenon. Moreover, the theoretical proposals that have been put forward account only for blocking of one lexical form by another. For example, Miyagawa (1980) proposes that the morphological categories of a langu

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