Athematic verbal forms in Italian

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 am a to ‘loved’, batt u to ‘beaten’ and part i to ‘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 2012 , Merchant 2015 ) 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 ( Haugen & Siddiqi 2016 ) 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.