Contextually conditioned allomorphy and the Basque locative: Spelling out the Basque extended nominal projection

This paper proposes a non-paradigmatic analysis of the Basque case system that facilitates a unified analysis of two anomalies in the distribution of the locative in Basque, namely the unexpected lack of exponence of the definite singular locative throughout the directional cases and in the scope of the adnominal linker -ko. These anomalies are analysed as effects of contextually conditioned zero spell-out of the locative morpheme and the singular determiner. Based on Embick's (2010) theory of cyclic spell-out, the present analysis predicts two cross-linguistic restrictions on morpheme interactions in the nominal domain.