Abstract In Athabascan languages, verbal morphological structure does not follow the cross-linguistically more common and stable ‘layered’ order: derivational and lexical affixes are not necessarily closer to the stem than inflectional affixes. While the emergence of the Athabascan order is understandable through different layers of grammaticalization (Mithun 2011), the question of why this order is relatively stable in the language family has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The distributional properties of cognate Athabascan morphemes reveal historical tendencies for fusion and reordering that suggest that affixes remain in or change their position depending on the semantic relevance to other affixes, not necessarily to the stem alone, as Bybee’s (1985) morphological theory would predict. An additional factor for the stability of non-layered structure of morphemes is the high degree of semantic generality found in affixes between the stem and other lexical and derivational affixes.

中文翻译：

---

有序走向无序

摘要 在阿萨巴斯卡语言中，语言形态结构不遵循跨语言更常见和稳定的“分层”顺序：派生词缀和词汇词缀不一定比屈折词缀更接近词干。虽然通过不同层次的语法化可以理解 Athabascan 语序的出现（Mithun 2011），但为什么这个语序在语系中相对稳定的问题尚未得到令人满意的回答。同源 Athabascan 语素的分布特性揭示了融合和重新排序的历史趋势，这表明词缀保留或改变它们的位置取决于与其他词缀的语义相关性，而不一定是单独的词干，正如 Bybee (1985) 形态学理论预测的那样。