Bermúdez-Otero (2013) argues that the Spanish lexicon stores whole stems complete with their theme vowels, rather than storing roots whose inflectional class features condition the insertion of particular theme vowels (as argued for in much Distributed Morphology (DM) work on Romance, such as Oltra-Massuet 1999, Oltra-Massuet and Arregi 2005). The argument turns on an apparent cyclicity paradox that Bermúdez-Otero (2013:65, 71) dubs the problem of the missing cycle. Bermúdez-Otero argues that this problem cannot be avoided if roots and categorizing heads are held to be atoms stored in the Spanish lexicon. The paradox can be circumvented only by embracing the notion of ‘‘stem’’ and taking the stem to be the unit stored as a lexical primitive.
This conclusion, if correct, would have far-reaching implications for the theory of the architecture of the grammar, since the notion of stem does not and cannot have any status as a...