synthetic/periphrastic alternation

[Heidi Harley]

hi john!

 No, you are not missing anything.  I took it as a given that we would
 like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their
 use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they
 realize appear.

Ah, I see. Obviously the more restricted the locality domain, the better
-- but I don't think there's any deep assumption about the DM framework
at stake. Maybe it'll turn out to be small, maybe big... One question:
by 'restricted to the syntactic word' are you meaning something like
'restricted to sister X° terminal nodes (mother a single X°)' (like
those created in the usualish idea of how head-movement works, and
maybe also by Merger Under Adjacency)? Or is there another idea of
'syntactic word' that you're referring to?

best, hh