Typological puzzles
From the point of view of what a universalist-typologist would normally expect to find in the distribution of verbal morphology, the following aspects of the Tolowa (and Athabaskan) verbal morphology represent baffling typological puzzles:
• The placement of some TAM morphology as suffixal (position −1), the rest as prefixal (position 5).
• The well-known Athabaskan puzzle of defining the lexical verb sense distributionally along the verbal word, through the coincidence of several positional morphemes, some semantically alive, some semantically opaque, one grammatical — and many of them occupying non-contiguous slots:
root (0) semantically alive
l (1) semantically opaque
perf (5) grammatically alive
u (6) semantically opaque
th (7) semantically opaque
re (10) semantically opaque
adv (11) semantically alive
adv (13) semantically alive
• The choice between three perfect morpheme (position 5) is semantically arbitrary, and thus must be lexically specified.
• The fact that the three perfect prefixes are used with some verbs as opaque (‘dummy’) thematic prefixes (position 7).
• The extensive interspersion of lexical-semantic, lexical-opaque and grammatical morphemes.
• The distance of the 3rd person plural markers (slots (9), (12), (15)) from the subject pronoun position, as well as the dispersal of that position in three slots.
• The dispersal of transitivity-related morphemes into two non-adjacent slots (2), (8), including cases when the function is identical (passive).
• The placement of object pronouns in two possible slots (8), (14)
• Reconciling all these puzzles within the framework of an SOV language.
To a linguist acquainted with typology and universals and trained in diachronic syntax and grammaticalization, the Athabaskan verb represents the supreme challenge, the Mount Everest of Internal Reconstruction. The challenge is to show that this extremely bizarre synchronic verbal morphology nevertheless arose via perfectly sane and universally attested avenues of diachronic change and grammaticalization.
