Romance theme vowels: not just ornamental morphemes, but not syntactic elements either

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• Eva-Maria Remberger (University of Vienna) and Natascha Pomino (University of Wuppertal)
• Tuesday 08 November 2022, 13:00-14:15
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Onkar Singh.

You can register via the following link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIscOqgrzosE9zlK7yiv4rsb3sy7qe2YkMx.

Theme vowels (ThV) are considered by many linguists (e.g. Oltra-Massuet 1999) to be mere ornamental elements without any effect on syntax and semantics (see however Fábregas 2017). We agree with the idea that ThVs are not to be confused with the realizations of the verbalizer v°, but we would like to show that they are not as ornamental as one may think. Work on the systematicity of stem allomorphy has shown that irregularity of inflected elements is related to a reduced number of affixes of these forms (cf. Vanden Wyngaerd 2018). In Romance, many irregular verbs lack a ThV, i.e. they are athematic. Thus, it seems as if ThVs have an impact on the (ir)regularity of verbal forms (Calabrese 2015). One central question is, however, how athematicity is implemented in the theoretical framework, in this case Distributed Morphology (DM, see Halle & Marantz 1993): Is athematicity explainable by zero exponence, by fusion or by cumulative exponence? The aim of this talk is to investigate more in detail the connection between irregularity and athematicity and to argue for an approach based on cumulative exponence. Most Romance languages have reduced the Latin conjugation classes (CCs) maintaining only three main classes which are marked as general rule by different theme vowels (ThVs). The development in French, however, is different and has led to less transparent verbal forms and to a CC system that is not describable, at first glance, in terms of ThVs. In our talk, we will show that the link between athematicity and irregularity is attested also in other verbal forms in Romance and, more important, it holds also for French, a language for which the assumption of ThV is contradictorily discussed in the literature. We will discuss the CC system of French and propose that it has two thematic and several athematic CCs. Certain types of root allomorphy, e.g. the (non)appearance of root final consonants, depend, in essence, on whether or not there is a ThV-position available (cf. also Schane 1966). As will be shown, the athematic CCs are exactly the ones with the (most) irregular verbs, in French as in other verbal forms in Romance. Following the DM-based Vocabulary Insertion-Only model proposed by Haugen & Siddiqi (2016), we will propose, for selected Romance verbal forms, an analysis for the mentioned link between athematicity and irregularity based on Spanning. Since the exact conditions and rules for Spanning are still to be investigated, we contribute to the discussion of this issue by the analyses of verbal forms in Romance. The core idea of the analysis proposed is that the spanning size of the vocabulary items (VIs) realizing the roots depends on the respective CC-features and is motivated by the (a)thematicity of the roots. What is more, our analysis is predominantly based on the general process of Vocabulary Insertion to correctly derive the Romance forms. There is no need for Fusion, Pruning nor Impoverishment; root allomorphy is instead explained in essence via Vocabulary Insertion only.

References Calabrese, Andrea. 2015. Irregular Morphology and Athematic verbs in Italo-Romance. Isogloss, Special Issue on Italo-Romance morphosyntax: 69–102. Oltra Massuet, I. 1999. On the constituent structure of Catalan verbs. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 33. 279–322. Fábregas, A. 2017. Theme vowels are verbs. In Caha / DeClercq & Vanden Wyngaerd (eds.), The unpublished manuscript. A collection of Lingbuzz papers to celebrate Michal Starke’s 50th birthday. 51–62. Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. En Kenneth Hale, and Samuel Keyser (eds.), The view of building 20: Essays in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Haugen, Jason D. & Daniel Siddiqi. 2016. “Towards a Restricted Realization Theory. Multimorphemic monolistemicity, portmanteaux, and post-linearization spanning.” In Morphological Metatheory. Edited by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 343–86. Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido. 2018. Suppletion and affix reduction. Accessed October 29, 2021. https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/004095. Schane, Sanford A. 1966. The morphophonemics of the French verb. Language 42/4: 746–758.

This talk is part of the Romance Linguistics Seminars (RoLinC) series.

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