Description: Athapaskan languages are of great linguistic interest due to their intricate morphology. In this clear and insightful book, Keren Rice offers a rich survey of morpheme ordering in Athapaskan verbs, with implications for both synchronic grammar and language change. She argues that verb structure is predictable across Athapaskan languages if certain abstract aspects of meaning are considered. This is the first major comparative study of its type for Athapaskan languages, combining descriptive depth with a contemporary theoretical perspective.
Review Quotes: 'This book treats virtually all of the important matters pertaining to the grammatical features of the Athapaskan verb word, in depth for an impressive number of individual languages and in sumptuous comparative detail for languages representative of the family as a whole ...The book contains at least a dozen detailed and interesting discussions of the ordering of elements in the Athapaskan verb word. It contains much more than this, however. New analyses of many aspects of the Athapaskan verb are developed. These are consistently of great value and full of the insight and scholarship we have come to expect from this fine linguist and Athapaskanist ... Rice's book is a treasure. Though it is organized around the theme of morpheme order, it is a rich source of both problems and solutions in Athapaskan linguistics generally and deserves to be considered a classic in the field.' Ken Hale, Diachronica