So far, I have made the following observations: morphemes that enter into a scopal relationship with each other exhibit fixed order if their semantic relationship is fixed, if their semantic relationship is variable, their ordering varies according to this relationship, and if there is no semantic relationship between morphemes, their ordering with respect to each other may also vary. Based on these observations, I concluded that morpheme order in the verb of Athapaskan languages is regulated by scope. In this chapter, I would like to examine the morpheme stock of Athapaskan languages to provide further evidence for the claim that morpheme order is regulated not by an arbitrary template but rather by principles of universal grammar.

Predictions

In chapter 3, I laid out two hypotheses that might account for morpheme order in the verb of Athapaskan languages. Under the template hypothesis, morphemes are marked for the position that they appear in, and linear order need not reflect word formation. Thus, the ordering in a template is arbitrary, and, as discussed by Spencer 1991, in many ways quite unconstrained as compared with layered morphology.

Consider the consequences of the template hypothesis for language change. According to this hypothesis, the similarities in morpheme order across the language family are a consequence of common origins: at an early stage of the family, only a single template was available.