Latin Theme Vowels and Cophonologies

Latin grammars traditionally divide verbs into four conjugations, identifiable (more or less readily) by their theme vowel. The identification of each theme vowel has been the object of several phonological analyses (Allen – Greenough 1903; Lieber 1981; Oniga 2014; Embick 2015; Halle 2019). This paper takes departure from Van der Spuy (2020), who has proposed that the theme vowels of Latin verbs can be analysed in terms of cophonologies. After elaborating on Van der Spuy’s idea, this work concludes there is no need to postulate such cophonologies. Indeed, it is argued that the overall behaviour of Latin theme vowels is much less complicated: the deletion of the theme vowel in conjugations I and III can be explained through a single rule of Latin phonology, namely Back Vowel Deletion, by assuming, as in Halle (2019), that the theme vowel of the III conjugation is underlyingly /ɪ/. As for the mixed conjugation, although it can be argued that it represents a proper subset of the IV conjugation (Van Der Spuy 2020), it is shown here that postulating an underlying /iː/ for it is not beneficial to an analysis of Latin theme vowels in terms of cophonologies. While the section on Van Der Spuy’s cophonologies relies on Optimality Theory, it is intended in the conclusion that the behaviour of Latin theme vowels can be better understood and formalized within the rule-based framework of Distributed Morphology.