Russian nominalizations as a window on the verbal theme
November 24, 2021
Join Zoom Meeting
Starts at 16:30 (Moscow time)
Ora Matushansky
SFL (CNRS/Université Paris-8/UPL)/UiL OTS/Utrecht University
Abstract
The role of the so-called thematic suffix in the morphology and semantics of the Russian verb has long been an object of investigation. I will examine the hypothesis that the thematic suffix corresponds to the little v of Distributed Morphology (Fabregas 2017, Mišmaš and Simonovic 2021, etc.) in the context of deverbal nominalizations, comparing thematic and athematic deverbal nouns. I will argue that while deverbal nominalizations do not support the hypothesis that theme vowels introduce the event argument (v proper) or the external argument (Voice), they nonetheless provide some evidence against treating them as semantically empty (contra Aronoff 1994, Oltra-Massuet 1999, Calabrese 2015 and Gribanova 2015).
Handout