"In this book Keren Rice offers a rich typological survey of morpheme ordering in Athapaskan verbs, with implications for both synchronic grammar and language change. Arguing against a view that sees morpheme order in Athapaskan languages as templatic and essentially without principle, she shows that verb structure is in fact widely predictable across languages if appropriate syntactic factors and an overarching principle of semantic scope are taken into account.

The presentation also includes a detailed study of argument and aspectual systems."--BOOK JACKET.