Syncope and epenthesis have been treated as two closely related phenomena in traditional accounts: what syncope destroys, epenthesis restores. In this paper we present some cases of vowel epenthesis in the verbal domain in some Northern Emilian varieties where both syncope and epenthesis are rather restricted. It will be shown that apparently free alternations in some arhizotonic forms, like lizì vs. alzì ‘you.pl read’, are to be considered as the result of two different grammars. Only in one of these there is allomorphy of verb stems triggered by the interaction of morphosyntactic configurations, and morphophonological and phonotactic constraints.