Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope

'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

• 1. Introduction: beginning the journey; Part I. First Steps: 2. Introducing the problem; 3. Global uniformity and local variability: a possible account; Part II. The Lexical Terms: 4. First stop: introducing the lexical items; 5. A brief side trip: the position of the verb stem; 6. Ordering of the lexical items; 7. Voice/valence; 8. Summary: lexical items; Part III. The Functional Items: 9. An introduction to the functional elements; 10. Pronominals; 11. The aspect system; 12. Qualifiers and their ordering; 13. On the ordering of functional items; Part IV. A View of the Lexicon: 14. The scopal hypothesis and simplifying the lexicon; 15. Evidence from the lexicon; Part V. The End of the Journey: 16. Looking back, looking ahead; Part VI. Appendices: Appendix 1. Templates and affix ordering; Appendix 2. The languages; Appendix 3. Summary of constraints and language differences; Notes; References; Indexes.