A unification of Indo-European aktionsart and Navajo verb theme categories

Abstract

In this paper, I explore verb theme categories in Navajo in general, and their relation to Indo-European Aktionsart in particular. Midgette (1995) argues that we should not consider Navajo verb theme categories to be the same sort of property as Indo-European Aktionsart, both because there are more verb theme categories than there are Aktionsarts, and because Aktionsart is part of the lexical semantics of a verb, while verb theme categories are derived through morphological processes. I suggest, however, that we may in fact view these as related phenomena. In making the case for a unified treatment of Navajo verb themes and Indo-European Aktionsart, I appeal to arguments from Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993), from non-lexical Aktionsart (Harley, 1999), and from varied approaches to word building (Marantz, 2001; Arad, 2003).