I now turn to the aspect system, focusing on the major semantic force of the elements generally known in the Athapaskan literature as mode, conjugation, and aspect. I concentrate almost exclusively on Slave, as it is the language that I am most familiar with. The aspect system provides a great analytic challenge to the researcher interested in morpheme order. I argue that the aspect system of the functional complex of the verb is best viewed as consisting of three major types of items, which mark viewpoint aspect, situation type aspect, and subsituation aspect. A major part of the chapter is devoted to showing that these three components are overtly marked within the verb. The general ordering of these categories is as follows: subsituation aspect < situation aspect < viewpoint aspect. This ordering is, I argue, consistent with the scope hypothesis in that the categories to the right, or higher in the structure, impose conditions on the categories to their left.

Aspect 1: Viewpoint Aspect

Smith 1991, 1997 argues that aspectual meaning is of two major kinds, each contributing its own type of information. Situation type aspect identifies a situation as either an event or a state, and viewpoint aspect conveys a temporal perspective that focuses all or part of the situation (Smith 1997:xiii). In this chapter, I argue that Athapaskan languages have rich overt morphological systems for expressing both situation type aspect and viewpoint aspect. I begin with viewpoint aspect.