Blocking effects in the expression of negation Jack Hoeksema Groningen Abstract Dutch (like German) avoids adjacency of negation and indefinite pronouns, e.g. *niet iets, *niet er- gens, *niet ooit ("not anything", "not anywhere", "not ever," respectively). On the basis of corpus data, various factors which help improve such sequences are identified (such as discourse factors like echoing, as well as syntactic factors like the particular syntactic position of negation, the indefi- nite and the presence of postmodifiers) and an account of the remaining ungrammatical cases is pro- vided in terms of blocking by n-words. It is argued that n-words such as niets, nergens, nooit, being lexicalized units, are preferred over complex syntactic structures. At the same time, an account is given for the lack of blocking effects in English in terms of the different type of negation (with ne- gation incorporated in the auxiliary) and word order in that language. 1. Introduction.' The idea that one way of expressing a given meaning may block another way of expressing it is hardly new. It has been around at least since Hermann Paul's Über die Aufgaben der Wortbildungslehre (Paul 1896). The morphological literature is full of references to this idea, and of proposals to embed the notion into a larger theory of language. In present-day syntax, the idea of blocking is less popular, presumably because blocking did not fit in with the gen- eral trend of the 1970's and 1980's away from paradigmatic relations to syntagmatic rela- tions. Theories as different as Government-Binding Grammar, HPSG, LFG or categorial grammar all agree on the need to view the unwelformedness of a sentence or phrase just in terms of its own internal structure, and the constraints which the grammar imposes on that structure. The fact that something might be informed, or considered ill-formed, because there is an alternative way of expressing its meaning was disallowed from theoretical considera- tion, because that would imply a transderivational constraint, something which teachers of introductory syntax would routinely mention with a shudder as a terrible outgrowth of the permissiveness of the 1960's, with its free-flowing Generative Semantics paradigm. Now, in the 1990's, blocking is back, together with a new interest in paradigmatic aspects of linguis- tic structure. We see this in Minimalism (Chomsky 1995), where alter-native derivations are compared for economy, but more spectacularly in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which can be seen as a particular theory of blocking. In this paper, I will take an eclectic position as regards the position of blocking in the grammar. I assume that the grammar is used by the computational system which allows us to formulate and understand utterances to produce a set of candidates for expressing a given meaning. These candidates are subject to a number of output constraints which may be ab- This paper was presented at the conference on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of negation, held at the University of Salford, October 30 - November 1, 1998, and at the University of Tübingen, November 27 1998.1 want to thank the audiences at both events for stimulating discussion.