Athabaskan languages display a remarkable cross-language similarity,
yet
at the same time the languages of this family differ from each other in
restricted ways. This unity and variety provide a useful laboratory for
phonological and morphological research. In this paper, we suggest that
a
certain case of unity which has been analysed as phonologically and
morphologically motivated requires a purely morphological analysis.
The case in question is the well-known verbal disyllabic minimality
requirement, which has been variously analysed as satisfaction of a
disyllabic verb template (Slave; Rice 1990), satisfaction of a monosyllabic
prefix-based portmanteau ‘stem’ (Navajo; McDonough 1990, 1996)
or
the result of stray consonant syllabification in the Minimal Word domain
in verbs (Ahtna; Causley 1994). However, when data from other languages
of the family are brought into the picture, a different, family-wide analysis
suggests itself.