Underlying Vowel Length in Modern Hebrew: The Many Realizations of the Vowel /a/

In the nominal morphology of Modern Hebrew, the vowels [a] and [e] alternate with each other and syncopate in several contexts. These contexts have received separate phonological and/ or morphological analyses in the past. The phonological analyses have yielded phonologically unnatural rules; the morphological analyses have turned to the unconstrained concept of stem-allomorphy. In the first part of this paper, a unifying account of these vocalic alternations is provided in the framework of cvcvPhonology (Lowenstamm 1996), relating the contexts to one another. Specifically, it is proposed that some vowels are phonologically long, either lexically or through a rule of pretonic lengthening. In the second part of the paper, an alternation which resists the strictly phonological explanation is shown to follow from morpho-syntactic principles of derivation by phase (Embick 2010). While certain phonological processes apply whenever the domain of a category head is processed, only the merger of the head d triggers the realization of the underlying phonological string.