Lowest theme vowels or highest roots? An ‘unaccusative’ theme-vowel class in Slovenian

Abstract

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 status of derivational affixes as roots within the framework of Distributed Morphology and (ii) the debate on the correlation between theme vowel classes with certain argument structures in Slavic. Focusing on Slovenian, our core data will come from active l-participles that are used adjectivally as an unaccusativity diagnostic. We take these l-participles to create a list of 109 unaccusative verbs. 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. The e/i-class is furthermore the only theme vowel class whose theme vowel surfaces in adjectival l-participles, the theme vowel class to which inchoatives belong and behaves uniformly with respect to stress. Based on the uniform behavior of the e/i-class which sets it apart from other theme vowel-classes, we will argue that the vowel of this class is better analyzed as a root.

Theme-vowel minimal pairs show argument structure alternations

“…The observation that theme vowel differences are associated with argument structure differences is also present in the literature on South Slavic and outside the Nanosyntactic framework (Marvin 2002;Milićević 2004;Arsenijević 2020;Simonović & Mišmaš 2022). For instance, in the 'minimal pair' of verbs in footnote 1 repeated here as Example (2), the unaccusative version Example (2a) comes with the theme vowel -e-, whereas its causative, transitive counterpart Example (2b) contains the theme vowel -i-.…”

“…Milosavljević & Arsenijević (2022) account for significant tendencies displayed by different theme vowels by proposing that all theme vowels are syntactically verbalizers, and their different morphological realization is based on multiple markedness scales in a procedure that takes place at the interface with phonology after the lexical material is introduced. Even more radically, Simonović & Mišmaš (2022) conclude that some traditional theme vowels in Slovenian that participate in argument structure alternations are not genuine theme vowels but rather roots that combine with other (lexical) roots. It is clear that there are numerous avenues for formalizing these phenomena, not all of which could be explored here.…”

“…1 Fábregas (2018) provides an implementation of this intuition by assuming that theme vowels are light verbs, and theme vowel differences correspond to different v heads or 'flavors of v' (Folli & Harley 2005). Finally, some authors (Matushansky 2021;Simonović & Mišmaš 2022;Kwapiszewski 2022, who credits a related approach of Czaykowska-Higgins 1998) have argued that Slavic theme vowels do not form a homogenous category but can be divided into genuine verbalizers and ornamental morphemes.…”

Adnominal Arguments in Phrases Headed by Deverbal Nouns in Slovenian

“…Schoorlemmer (1995), Harves (2009). For a discussion of Slovenian unaccusative verbs existing as a group with special properties, see Marvin and Ilc (2016) and Simonović and Mišmaš (2022). We believe that the data from Slavic languages (at least Slovenian and Russian) argue against generalizing Alexiadou's claim that process nominals cannot be derived from unergative verbs.…”