Transparency of inflectionless modifiers for Bulgarian definite marker placement

abstract

The current work offers an analysis of definite marker placement in Bulgarian, deriving it through postsyntactic movement of D to a head bearing nominal features, with locality defined in terms of feature-relativized closest c-command. In addition to capturing previous observations about the distribution of the definite marker, the analysis is supported by novel evidence from exceptionally inflectionless modifiers in the language. The account is in line with a more general formulation of postsyntactic movement in terms of c-command, and highlights the relevance of exceptionally inflectionless elements to morphosyntactic theory.