Following McGinnis (1995), who used a Distributed Morphology (DM) approach (Halle & Marantz 1993; 1994) within a minimalist syntactic framework (Chomsky 1995), I analyze the distribution of morphological elements referring to phi-features in Tiberian Hebrew finite verbs in terms of feature checking. In the Imperfect and relaxed verb forms, phi-features are marked by prefixes and suffixes; in some cases the same feature is marked in both types of affix on the same form. In contrast, the phi-feature associated with all other inflected forms are marked by suffixes alone. I assume that features associated with inflectional suffixes are checked in the syntax and do not require word-internal checking, but the features associated with the Imprefect must be checked in both the syntactic and morphological components. This additional round of checking results in a structure where a copy of the features is merged/adjoined with V, both of which may be spelled out. The close structural association of the adjoined Imperfect phi-features with V also counts for the observation that the imperfect inflectional prefixes are the only phi-referring morphological elements incorporated into TH stems
