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Article published In: Italo-Romance Morphosyntax: Theoretical and empirical issues
Edited by Francesco Maria Ciconte and Michela Cennamo
[Linguistic Variation 26:1] 2026
► pp. 24–60

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Athematic verbal forms in Italian

A DM-analysis based on spanning

 | University of Wuppertal
ORCiD logo with link | University of Vienna
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Vienna.

Published online: 17 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24064.pom
Abstract
In a series of papers, Calabrese (2012ff) has convincingly argued that there is a link between the (a)thematicity and the (ir)regularity of verbal forms, cf. the regular and thematic past participles amato ‘loved’, battuto ‘beaten’ and partito ‘left’ vs. the irregular and athematic forms perso ‘lost’, corso ‘run’ and chiuso ‘closed’. While we completely agree with Calabrese’s observation that the presence of a Theme Vowel (ThV) has a direct effect on regularity of the respective verbal forms whereas its absence may cause allomorphy, in this paper, we will show that his analysis is far too complex and can be simplified by assuming Spanning (Svenonius, Peter. 2012. Spanning. Master’s dissertation, CASTL, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway., Merchant, Jason. 2015. How much context is enough? Two cases of span-conditioned stem allomorphy. Linguistic Inquiry 461. 273–303. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) for Vocabulary Insertion. We argue that Theme Vowels function as a kind of intermediate domain delimiter and we show, following the Vocabulary Insertion-Only Model (. 2016. Towards a Restricted Realization Theory. Multimorphemic monolistemicity, portmanteaux, and post-linearization spanning. In Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds.), Morphological Metatheory, 343–86. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) within the framework of DM (Distributed Morphology), that many of the context-specific rules and processes proposed by Calabrese can be reduced to Vocabulary Insertion.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Italian past participles and the synthetic perfect: Descriptive facts and Calabrese’s analysis
    • 2.1The morphology of Italian perfect and past participle
    • 2.2Basic assumptions in DM
    • 2.3Calabrese’s analyses
      • 2.3.1Calabrese’s (2012) analysis of the irregular perfect and past participle forms
      • 2.3.2Calabrese’s (2015a, b) analysis of the irregular perfect and past participle forms
  • 3.A spanning approach for irregular verbal forms
    • 3.1Insights from suppletion
    • 3.2Spanning, allomorphy, and locality domains
    • 3.3The perfect forms: A spanning approach
    • 3.4Spanning and the past participles
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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