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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.

I challenge the conventional understanding of Romance theme vowels (TVs) as universally identifying conjugation classes, and advance a unified and classless synchronic analysis of phi-feature exponence in Fiuman, an endangered Venetian variety spoken in Rijeka/Fiume, Croatia, and its diaspora. I propose that phi-features are exponed by the same Vocabulary Items, regardless of adjacent theme vowels. Various alternations, which give rise to the illusion of conjugation classes emerge in phonology, through the interaction between TV exponents and phi-feature Vocabulary Items, some of which have underspecified phonological structures, containing floating vocalic features. This interaction is modelled in an Optimality Theory grammar sensitive to phasal spellout. The realisation of phonologically underspecified Vocabulary Items is enforced by the Faithfulness constraint *UNREALISEDMORPHEME, argued to be a more parsimonious and modular version of REALIZEMORPHEME. *UNREALISEDMORPHEME militates against complete non-realisation of Vocabulary Items inserted in the current cycle. I examine evidence for the featural Vocabulary Items proposed based on regular verbs in the domain of irregular verbs as well as nominal and adjectival inflection, demonstrating the potential for extending the analysis to these two domains.

This paper investigates correlations between theme vowels and argument structure in Serbo-Croatian. Specifically, we focus on two different theme vowels, -i- and -ova-, isolating ‘minimal pairs’, that is cases where the same base combines with the two theme vowels to derive different verbs. Starting from two online corpora of Serbo-Croatian, we created a comprehensive list of -i-/-ova- minimal pairs. For all pairs in the list whose both members were attested at least 50 times in the corpora, we randomly selected 50 tokens per verb and annotated them for transitivity. A statistical comparison of -i- and -ova- verbs according to the proportions of transitive uses was carried out. The findings show that -i- verbs are much more likely to be used transitively than -ova- verbs. This finding corroborates the view that theme vowels are associated with argument structure properties and challenges the idea that they are universally ‘ornamental’ pieces of morphology without syntactic/semantic import. Based on these and supplementary (non-corpus) data, we claim that -i- derives transitives and unaccusatives, while -ova- derives unergatives. We propose a model couched in Distributed Morphology whereby these two theme vowels are treated as instantiations of different ‘flavors of v’.

Proto-Indo-European verbal morphology is generally described as consisting of at least a “thematic” and an “athematic” conjugation, which differ in whether or not a fixed vocalic piece adjacent to the root (traditionally known as “thematic vowel”) is present. This paper investigates the behavior of the outcomes of the thematic vowels in three ancient Indo-European languages: Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. We show that, on the one hand, Latin thematic vowels are typically “ornamental”, in that they lack any morpho-syntactico-semantic information, and are used exclusively for classification purposes; on the other hand, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek thematic vowels are fully functional, in that they expone (at least) aspectual information. We argue for a diachronic account of such differential treatment of thematicity across the three languages, whereby the original functionality of such pieces, albeit fully preserved in Sanskrit, was gradually lost over time, and finally gave rise to the Latin verbal ornamental system.

I challenge the conventional understanding of Romance theme vowels (TVs) as universally identifying conjugation classes, and advance a unified and classless synchronic analysis of phi-feature exponence in Fiuman, an endangered Venetian variety spoken in Rijeka/Fiume, Croatia, and its diaspora. I propose that phi-features are exponed by the same Vocabulary Items, regardless of adjacent theme vowels. Various alternations, which give rise to the illusion of conjugation classes emerge in phonology, through the interaction between TV exponents and phi-feature Vocabulary Items, some of which have underspecified phonological structures, containing floating vocalic features. This interaction is modelled in an Optimality Theory grammar sensitive to phasal spellout. The realisation of phonologically underspecified Vocabulary Items is enforced by the Faithfulness constraint *UNREALISEDMORPHEME, argued to be a more parsimonious and modular version of REALIZEMORPHEME. *UNREALISEDMORPHEME militates against complete non-realisation of Vocabulary Items inserted in the current cycle. I examine evidence for the featural Vocabulary Items proposed based on regular verbs in the domain of irregular verbs as well as nominal and adjectival inflection, demonstrating the potential for extending the analysis to these two domains.

In a series of papers within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), Calabrese (2012 et seq.) has convincingly argued that there is a link between the (a)thematicity and the (ir)regularity of verbal forms: the presence of a Theme Vowel (ThV) has a direct effect on the regularity of the respective verbal forms whereas its absence may cause allomorphy. However, Calabrese posits numerous postsyntactic processes and idiosyncratic rules, which – in our opinion – lack cognitive plausibility. In this paper, we will show that spanning (Svenonius 2012; Merchant 2015) is an economical and adequate way to implement verbal allomorphy in Romance. We argue that morpho-phonologically realized ThVs function as a kind of intermediate domain delimiter and we show, following the DM-based Vocabulary Insertion-Only Model (Haugen & Siddiqi 2016), that many of the context-specific rules and processes proposed in other works can be reduced to Vocabulary Insertion. Our analysis keeps the elements in syntax as small as possible, but allows spanning Vocabulary Items (VIs), i.e. VIs that realize more than one syntactic terminal node at once. We will illustrate our approach through analyzes of grammatically determined athematicity, athematic conjugation classes (CC), and inherited athematicity in irregular Romance verb inflection.

We examine two hypotheses regarding the role of theme vowels (ThVs) in Serbo- Croatian (SC): (i) that the various ThVs attested in SC are markedness-based realizations of the same syntactic feature specification, and (ii) that different ThVs carry different syntactic features. We focus on the two SC ThVs occurring with the highest number of bases: and (the ordered pair specifies the infinitive-stem and the present-tense-stem realization of the ThV). We show that if these ThVs are to be distinguished by feature specification, the best fitting analysis has bearing only the categorial verbal feature, while is additionally specified for the feature [SCALE], which contributes scalarity to the verbal predicate (Hay et al. 1999; Kennedy & Levin 2008). A corpus-based exploration shows that the stronger hypothesis (ii) encounters problems, the most obvious being that the regularities are only tendential, with a significant number of exceptions. If the ThVs carried different features, they would be expected to yield systematic patterns. We conclude that the weaker alternative (i) provides an empirically more accurate account and propose a specific model where at the interface with phonology, the aggregate degree of markedness of the context in which the ThV is realized is computed from a set of markedness hierarchies of the relevant phonological and semantic properties of that context (the latter mediated by the corresponding syntactic features). A mapping of the aggregate degree of markedness onto the morphological markedness hierarchy of ThVs determines the realization.

This paper investigates the role of simplex perfectives in the Russian aspectual system, which are known to display a number of characteristics that seem to escape a proper theoretical treatment. It is proposed that simplex perfective roots (like reš- or bros-) share with internally prefixed base predicates (like napis- or pročit-) a maximal path in their event descriptions. The two classes of predicates differ from each other, however, in that only the latter require their events to realise the path up to its limit. The underspecification of so-called simplex perfectives with respect to event maximality is resolved by the choice of the different theme vowels -a or -i. A theoretical model is developed that derives the actual verb forms in accordance with their aspectual values. It implements two different morphological cycles, with theme vowel insertion demarkating the end of the first one. Early (internal) and late (external) prefixation are defined relative to this.

This article argues in favour of a view of the Spanish Theme Vowel (ThV) as the direct spell out of an identifiable syntactic head, specifically Ramchand's (2018) Event head, responsible for tagging lexical verbs with world and time parameters. I will argue that several apparent cases of verbal irregularity related to the conjugation of 1sg forms can be related to each other, and can receive a principled explanation once one adopts this view of Spanish ThVs. An approach where ThVs are post-syntactic morphemes that idiosyncratically tag the functional structure of verbs, or where they are syntactically inert morphemes, can only treat these facts as accidental and cannot provide an account of their mutual interconnection.

This paper focuses on the e/i theme vowel class of verbs in Slovenian to bring together two seemingly unrelated debates: (i) the debate on the correlation between theme vowel classes with certain argument structures and (ii) the debate on the status of derivational affixes within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Our core data come from a list of 108 unaccusative verbs obtained using the adjectival active l-participles as an unaccusativity diagnostic. We show that (i) no unaccusative verbs belong to the two largest theme vowel classes in Slovenian (a/a and i/i), whereas (ii) the two big theme vowel classes tend to get accusative arguments quite frequently. Most importantly, (iii) the e/i-class stands out since more than one half of the unaccusative sample falls into it. The e/i-class is furthermore exceptional in that its theme vowel surfaces in adjectival l-participles, it is the theme vowel class to which inchoatives in inchoative-causative pairs belong and it behaves uniformly with respect to stress. Based on this behavior which sets the e/i-class apart from other theme vowel-classes, we argue that the morpheme e/i is better analyzed as a derivational affix. We further argue, following Lowenstamm (2014), that derivational affixes are transitive roots rather than categorizers and propose detailed PF and LF instructions for the root under consideration.