How vowels point to syntactic structure: roots and skeletons in Hebrew and Italian

In this paper, we discuss theme vowels in Modern Hebrew and Italian. These vowels reveal a morphological phenomenon that cannot be attributed to the specific root or to the category-assigning head. In Modern Hebrew, theme vowels are positioned between the last two radicals, whereas in Italian they are suffixed to the root. We claim that both languages have an intermediate level which introduces these theme vowels. The difference in position follows from the non-syllabified status of Modern Hebrew roots at insertion. We further show that both languages exhibit direct merger of n and the root.