The status of verbal theme vowels in contemporary linguistic theorizing: some recent developments. An introduction.

Abstract

Contemporary theoretical approaches to morphology have devoted considerable attention to verbal theme vowels, i.e., the issue of whether they can be shown to possess identifiable syntactic or semantic properties. The position that theme vowels are items without syntactic or semantic import has profound theoretical consequences, entailing the existence of an autonomous component of Grammar dedicated to Morphology (Aronoff 1994, Anderson 1992, Embick and Halle 2003). Approaches that dispense with a separate morphological module must assume that theme vowels do, in fact, have discernible semantic contributions (Jabłońska 2004, 2007). In this paper, we review the arguments from both sides in order to set the stage for and critically examine a series of new contributions published in this Special Collection. On balance, evidence of a link between theme vowels and particular meaning components (either aspect or argument structure) can be observed, though only in the form of (often very strong) tendencies, which figure most prominently in ‘minimal pairs’ of verbs differing only in their theme vowel. We highlight this observation and the methodological approaches that were employed to extract it (quantitative corpus or experimental studies) as the main contribution of this Special Collection and discuss the theoretical significance of this finding. Our position is that it cannot be taken as a falsification of the view that theme vowels are ‘pure morphology’, to the extent that it would require proof of a perfect correlation between theme vowels and a particular semantic property. At the same time, following Marantz (1997) we consider the possibility that categorial rules are not necessarily to be expected in structures involving only a root and a little v, highlighting an innovative approach in terms of markedness hierarchies where aspect/argument structure is only one factor determining theme vowel selection (Milosavljević and Arsenijević 2022) as a possible way of deriving non-categorial rules observed in other papers from a mix of morphosyntactic and phonological factors.