A morphosyntactic approach to gender and thematic vowels in the formation of Spanish diminutives

Abstract

In this paper, I address the formation processes of Spanish diminutives focusing on the relationship between gender and thematic vowels, the materialization of the latter being often taken to hinge on phonological conditioning for their scarcely predictable behavior in the diminutive environment. The analysis made here is of morphosyntactic nature. I adopt the view that gender and thematic vowels are disjoint features, that is, they are introduced in the derivation at a postsyntactic stage. Then, I argue that diminutive suffixes have a highly underspecified root status. An explication is offered showing that the linear proximity of the disjoint features at the moment of Vocabulary Insertion and their belonging to the same word-internal cyclic domain determine the eventual spell-out of thematic vowels.