Abstract
This chapter discusses the structure of the slave verb. The Athabaskan verb is commonly described as consisting of a stem and a number of prefixes, both inflectional and derivational in nature, whose ordering is unpredictable and requires a slot-and-filler, or template, analysis. The verb in an Athabaskan language is generally characterized as a template, consisting of a string of fixed-order position classes and morphemes that are marked lexically for the position that they fill in the template. In addition, boundary types are associated with different morpheme positions to account for their phonological properties. In generative grammar, one approach to the problem of polysynthetic languages is to claim that a word in such languages actually is a sentence. Slave is not highly marked in requiring that inflection not be syntactically accessible. This result is achieved by treating the verb complex as syntactic, as it follows from the assumption that morphemes with syntactic properties are syntactically accessible. The Athabaskan verb need not be a template, as the ordering of morphemes results from scope relationships. Thus, this treatment allows for the elimination of a number of problematic areas that make the verb highly marked among languages.
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