What differentiates Serbo-Croatian verbal theme vowels: content or markedness?

Abstract

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: <a, a> and <i, i> (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 <a, a> bearing only the categorial verbal feature, while <i, i> 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.

Allomorphy, morphological operations and the order of Slavic verb-prefixes

“…This means that both bear some specification which allows different contexts to choose one of the two. This view is corroborated by the quantitative findings in Milosavljević & Arsenijević (2022), showing that in BCMS the two themes are found in similar numbers of different verbs, and combine with similar numbers of different roots (due to rich verbal affixation in Slavic languages, these two quantities can display very different ratios). In our model this means that there is no Elsewhere allomorph for the theme vowel morpheme and theme vowel morphemes can only be inserted in the context of a root.…”

Theme-vowel minimal pairs show argument structure alternations

“…Kastner & Martin (2021) ascribe differences between two (traditional) conjugational classes in French to the interaction of a special v-cause morpheme with the type of the base it combines with. 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.…”

“…6 For a related view within the Cartographic approach, based on Russian data, see Dyachkov (2021). 7 Similarly, and Milosavljević & Arsenijević (2022) found significant differences between theme vowels -a-and -i-in Serbo-Croatian. These differences mostly concern the event structure (aspect, boundedness, scalarity), which is often based on different argument structure.…”