On April 10th, the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies hosted a talk by Prof. Antonio Fábregas (NTNU) entitled, “Spanish theme vowels as verbalisers: A nanosyntactic analysis”
The abstract of his talk is provided below:
Spanish has three conjugation classes, determined by three different morphemes that are usually treated as allomorphs of an ornamental morpheme marking verbs.
(1) a. cant-a 1st conjugation
sing-ThV
b. beb-e 2nd conjugation
drink-ThV
c. viv-i 3rd conjugation
live-ThV
In this talk I will argue, within a Nanosyntactic approach (Starke 2002, Caha 2009), that (i) theme vowels are the lexicalisation of syntactic features, specifically features required to turn the lexical verb into a Davidsonian event (EventP, in Ramchand 2018); (ii) that the 'lexical' distribution of the three conjugation classes depends on the size of the verbal root, which in the second and third conjugations can lexicalise part of the Event area, leaving the rest of the heads for the theme vowel; (iii) that suppletion patterns argue in favour of a strict size ordering between the three conjugation classes, with 1st conjugation roots being the smallest, 3rd conjugation roots being bigger than them and 2nd conjugation roots being the biggest. The analysis has the immediate outcome that so-called 'morphomic patterns' in irregularity can be derived without positing diacritics, morphological or phonological.
We extend our thanks to the organizers for making Prof. Fábregas’ visit possible.