"Defining template 1.1 Templates: Often invoked, but undertheorized 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.1 To take two examples, consider Table 1.1, which schematizes the ordering of morphemes in verbs across the Athabaskan family, and Table 1.2, which gives data illustrating the application of a particular nickname formation strategy in Japanese where the resulting nicknames must be bimoraic in length. The pan-Athabaskan template described in Table 1.1 characterizes verbs in this family as consisting of a series of "slots" into which morphemes of different grammatically-defined classes appear"--