Selection and Blocking in the Northeast Dene Verb

Dene (Athabaskan) verbs are famous both for their highly complex morphophonemics, and for their often complex, idiosyncratic, and/or discontinuous morphological dependencies. The latter refers mainly to selection and blocking restrictions: two morphemes, in different positions in the verbal template, are either forbidden from appearing together on the surface (blocking), or one morpheme requires the presence of another morpheme (selection). This paper will show how both positive and negative constraining equations (Bresnan 2001, Dalrymple 2001) within LFG may be used to capture these effects. Data are taken from the Wıı̀lıı̀deh and Tetsǫ́t'ıné languages, based on the author's own fieldwork.