Nanosyntactic accounts of allomorphy like Caha et al. 2019 propose that
roots can only control affixal allomorphy when the affixes are directly
root-contiguous. By presenting two types of cross-linguistic
counterexamples to this claim, this paper argues that this generalization
is too restrictive. This paper examines a number of examples that show two
or more allomorphs that stand in apparent containment relations predicted
to be impossible, including plurals in German, Welsh, and Albanian, as well
as deponents in Latin. These examples challenge the Nanosyntactic notion
that lexical items refer to specific syntactic structures, suggesting that
a less restrictive model is required in order to capture the full extent of
cross-linguistic variation.