ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Spanish theme vowels (ThVs) are the spell out of the head Event, which defines the voice of a predicate and adds time and world parameters to the event description performed by the lexical verb. Three types of evidence are discussed for this claim: that copulative verbs lack theme vowels because they are also the spell out of Event, that the auxiliary haber ‘have’ consists of just one theme vowel, and the presence of ThVs in non-verbal environments where an active agent is necessary to license a derivational suffix.
