A preliminary task, prior to an investigation of ordering relationships among the lexical elements in the verb, is the establishment of the position of the verb stem in Athapaskan languages. Abstracting away from details of the verb, we find that across the language family, the morphemes in the verb come in the order in (1).

1. (1) lexical items – functional items – voice/valence – verb stem

The positioning of the verb stem at the right edge of the verb word is surprising for several reasons. First, it has long been observed that inflection tends to fall outside of derivation (see Anderson 1982, 1988 for detailed discussion). Although the definition of what is inflectional and derivational (for which I use the terms functional and lexical, respectively) in Athapaskan languages is not completely clear (see Kibrik 1995, Rice 1993, Speas 1990 and chapter 16), the Athapaskan verb nevertheless is a striking counterexample to this generalization. Recall the template for Slave provided in chapter 2, repeated here as (2).

1. (2) preverb # quantificational elements # incorporate # object % third person subject % qualifier + subsituation aspect + situation aspect + viewpoint aspect + 1/2 person subject = voice/valence + root + tense/mode/aspect suffix

The items in (2) that are separated by the # boundary symbol are known in the Athapaskan literature as disjunct prefixes.