Serbo-Croatian secondary imperfectivisers consist of theme vowels

Abstract

Building on the proposal in Marković (2018: p.77) that Serbo-Croatian secondary imperfectivisers, such as iva and ava, are in fact bimorphemic, we develop an autosegmental analysis of these morphemes and their allomorphs, showing that they consist of two theme vowels, i-a and a-a, respectively. We show that both [v] and [j] in these affixes behave as glides and that [v] in iva and ava is the exponent of floating features affiliated with the theme vowel a, whose underlying representation is /va/. The theme vowel i is shown to consist solely of the feature [+high]. These autosegmental representations allow us to explain the allomorphy of the two productive secondary imperfectivisers in Serbo-Croatian, but also the less productive apophony patterns. In addition, the autosegmental analysis of the theme vowels allows us to reduce the number of the theme vowel classes in Serbo-Croatian from 13 to 10.