The Typology of Templates

The notion of a template has been used in a number of linguistic domains to refer to grammatical patterns where the form of some linguistic constituent appears to be well conceptualized as consisting of a fixed linear structure, whether in terms of the arrangement of its subconstituents or its overall length. Most work on templates has restricted the topic of investigation to a single grammatical domain, e.g., morphophonology, rather than looking at templatic phenomena across grammatical domains. Such comparison reveals that a commonality among templatic constructions is that they involve 'unexpected' linear stipulation. This leaves open many questions regarding how they might be typologically compared, but the existing literature, nevertheless, indicates some dimensions of variation worthy of further investigation that could form the basis of a comprehensive study of template typology. The notion of a template has been used in linguistic analyses to refer to grammatical patterns where the form of some linguistic constituent appears to be well conceptualized via a fixed linear structure, whether in terms of ordering or length. To take two examples, consider Table 1, which schematizes the order of verbal morphemes across the Athabaskan family, and Table 2, which gives data illustrating the realization of a particular nickname formation strategy in Japanese. POSITION DESCRIPTION 1 Zero, one or more adverbial prefixes 2 The prefix for the iterative paradigm (lacking in some languages) 3 A pluralizing prefix 4 An object pronoun prefix, found only in transitive verbs and some passives 5 A deictic subject prefix 6 Zero, one, or two adverbial prefixes 7 A prefix marking mode, tense, or aspect 8 A subject pronoun prefix 9 A classifier prefix 10 A stem Table 1: A pan-Athabaskan verbal template (Hoijer 1971:125) 2 REGULAR NAME NICKNAME hanako hana-tyan akira aki-tyan taroo taro-tyan yooko yoo-tyan ti tii-tyan Table 2: A Japanese nickname template (Poser 1990) The pan-Athabaskan template described in table 1 characterizes verbs in this family as consisting of a series of " slots " into which morphemes of different grammatically-defined classes appear in left-to-right order. Hoijer (1971) does not explicitly use the word template to characterize his analysis, though this term is often found in the Athabaskanist literature to describe the verbal system (see, e.g., Rice (2000:9)). Section 2.5 will discuss, in detail, the issue of how we might rigorously define template, but at this point, it will be sufficient to say that the crucial feature of Hoijer's …