The inventory and the underlying distribution of theme vowels in the Portuguese noun class

Abstract

The paper discusses the underlying distribution and the inventory of theme vowels in the Portuguese noun class. Since it deals with the underlying distribution of theme vowels in both word constitution and derivation, the study not only considers the possibility of attaching suffixes to roots or to stems but also adopts the “stem-driven derivation”, admitting that the stem is stored in the permanent lexicon. Therefore, the theme vowel is in the basis of the derivation process of the nouns in the language since its subjacency. The observation of Portuguese grammar phenomena has shown that three types of criteria support this position: morphophonological, morphological and semantic ones. Regarding the inventory of nominal theme vowels in Portuguese, the study recognizes the singular behavior in the nouns of the language of the final-unstressed vowel /e/, by comparison with the vowels /o, a/. The vowel /e/ plays two roles; it is an epenthetic vowel and, in a restricted way, a theme vowel with no correlation with the gender whereas vowels /o, a/ are always theme vowels and agree with the gender of the words.