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.