The Intramorphological Meanings of Thematic Vowels in Italian Verbs

Abstract

Italian verbs are traditionally classified into three major classes called ‘conjugations’. Membership of a verb in one of the conjugations rests on the phonological content of the vowel occurring after the verbal root in some (but not all) word forms of the paradigm. This vowel is called ‘thematic vowel’. The main feature that has been attributed to thematic vowels throughout morphological literature is that they do not behave as classical Saussurean signs in that lack any meaning whatsoever. This work develops the claim that the thematic vowels of Italian verbs are, in fact, Saussurean signs in that they can be attributed a ‘meaning’ (‘signatum’), or even more than one (‘signata’). But the meanings that will be appealed to are somehow different from those which have traditionally been attributed to other morphological units, be they stems or endings: in particular, these meanings would not be relevant to the interpretation of a word form; rather, they would be relevant at the ‘purely morphological’ (‘morphomic’, in Aronoff’s (1994) terms) level of linguistic analysis. They are thus labelled ‘intramorphological’, remarking that they serve nothing but the morphological machinery of the language. The recognition of ‘intramorphological signata’ for linguistic signs strongly supports the claim about the autonomy of morphology within the grammar. If my analysis is correct, the thematic vowels of Italian verbs should be seen as the dedicated loci for such signata.

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