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Volume 26, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2211-6834
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Abstract

Abstract

In a series of papers, Calabrese (2012ff) has convincingly argued that there is a link between the (a)thematicity and the (ir)regularity of verbal forms, cf. the regular and thematic past participles ‘loved’, ‘beaten’ and ‘left’ vs. the irregular and athematic forms ‘lost’, ‘run’ and ‘closed’. While we completely agree with Calabrese’s observation that the presence of a Theme Vowel (ThV) has a direct effect on regularity of the respective verbal forms whereas its absence may cause allomorphy, in this paper, we will show that his analysis is far too complex and can be simplified by assuming (Svenonius 2012, Merchant 2015) for Vocabulary Insertion. We argue that Theme Vowels function as a kind of intermediate domain delimiter and we show, following the Vocabulary Insertion-Only Model (Haugen & Siddiqi 2016) within the framework of DM (Distributed Morphology), that many of the context-specific rules and processes proposed by Calabrese can be reduced to Vocabulary Insertion.

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2025-07-17
2026-03-11

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Athematic verbal forms in Italian
Linguistic Variation 26, 24 (2026); https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24064.pom
/content/journals/10.1075/lv.24064.pom
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): allomorphy; distributed morphology; Italian; past participles; spanning; suppletion generalization; synthetic perfect; theme vowels; verbal inflection

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