Verb constructs in Shkodër Gheg: morphosyntax of bare bases

This article addresses the morphological nature and the syntactic distribution of the reduced (or invariable) forms of the verb in the Gheg variety spoken in Shkodër. We can identify reduced forms with bare bases3, more precisely stems ending in consonant or including the thematic vowel. The probably best known instance of reduced form is the one that, introduced by the preposition mɛ ‘with’, realizes the paskajore ‘infinitive’, typically in control contexts where Romance and Germanic languages select an infinitive form. The reduced forms, normally identified with past participles, in reference to auxiliary contexts, show different morphophonological properties according to the verbal class, that we can divide, at least in the first instance, in vowel stems, including a thematic vocalic element, and consonant stems, ending in the root consonant. The occurrence of verb stems is not limited to participles and paskajore, but includes other contexts with different readings. Moreover, bare stems distinguish two alternants depending on the length of the stressed nucleus. We will propose an analysis based on the hypothesis that the same basic operation of Merge works both in forming sentences and complex words. Specifically, we assume that functional morphemes on a par with lexical ones, are fully interpretable, and, thus, they enter into the workspace for the syntactic operations.