Abstract:

There is little morphological evidence for little v as a verbalizing head in the literature. Greek, however, exhibits systematic verbalizing morphology and provides us with a strong case study for a robust morphophonological manifestation of the verbalizing v head. Evidence comes from the second-conjugation verbs (e.g., aɣap-ó ‘I love’, ster-ó ‘I deprive’), which display certain distinct morphophonological properties: (a) they take a vocalic extension in certain forms (e.g., aɣáp-i-s-a ‘I loved’) and (b) they exhibit post-root stress, unlike other verb forms (e.g., miní-o ‘I sue’, pal-év-o ‘I fight’). Following Spyropoulos et al. (2015), we argue that both characteristics reflect the morphophonological effects of the exponence of a verbalizing head v by means of an empty vocalic element  V. Furthermore, we provide evidence that a set of verbalizers, almost exclusively identified with a number of derivational suffixes (e.g., -ev, -iz, -(i)az, -on, -ar and -en), are also exponents of this verbalizing v head which is distinct from Voice, is not correlated with agentivity, transitivity and inner aspect / Aktionsart, and, more importantly, do not follow the second conjugation pattern. We propose that the abstract vocalic slot and the verbal derivational suffixes compete for the same morphosyntactic position and that they are both exponents of the verbalizing head v.