From: Vincent DeCaen (decaen@epas.utoronto.ca)
Date: Tue Aug 29 1995 - 16:02:03 EDT
Mark Aronoff. 1994. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional
Classes. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, no. 22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
in Ch.2 he deals with Latin verbal morphology. I was curious about
the system of stem "theme vowels".
the system given is six-fold:
aa, ee, ii
0, e, i
in this description it appears that we are missing interesting generalizations.
1. with *a>0, we get a perfect parallelism long vs short.
2. with either *vX>vv or *Xv>vv we reduce the system to a,e,i
3. e and i appear to be conditioned variants; preferably *i>e to
explain the monopoly of front vowels in the system.
I am interested in the proportion in light of 3:
ee : ii :: ea : ia :: ee : iee
the latter especially suggests a semi-vowel on the stem:
-stem-i-theme-endings
Q1. can someone refer me to a good recent source in which I can
indulge my curiosity? especially in the historical dimension?
Q2. can someone explain the system of theme vowels for the Greek verb?
how does it compare if at all????
Q3. can I get a good source for the question in IE comparative
perspective? is the verbal theme vowel part of the original system???
thanks in advance,
Vince
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