Theme Vowels e and i in Russian: Implementing the Cartographic Approach

The paper deals with the Russian theme vowels that can be regarded as derivational suffixes, in particular, with e- and i -vowels. The former derives emission verbs or inchoative verbs, whereas the latter derives causatives (both dynamic and stative), unergative behaviour-related verbs, and some others. I propose a uniform explanation of the fact that the same theme vowel can give rise to different structural types of verbs. I argue that, semantically, the best way to capture the differences between the two vowels is to implement the Ramchand’s model of predicate decomposition, where e -vowel encodes the process sub-event and i -vowel the initial sub-event.