We examine morphosyntactic knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut by Inuit receptive bilinguals (RBs) – heritage speakers who are capable of comprehension, but produce little or no speech. A grammaticality judgment study suggests that RBs possess sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations, though to a lesser degree than fluent bilinguals. Low-proficiency RBs are sensitive only to the most basic grammatical properties. Case omission is most difficult to detect, but morphemes bearing incorrect features (case oversuppliance, number agreement mismatch) or ordered incorrectly (tense and agreement, tense and negation) are easier, and performance on incorrect ordering of morphemes is near target with the core agreement morpheme for all RBs. While receptive bilinguals show patterns of grammatical deficits, they also demonstrate clear knowledge of the basic properties of word structure in Inuttitut. This has implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization efforts.
This chapter argues – closely following the insights of Berge (2011) – that the ergative clause structure of the Inuit language is conditioned by information structure properties, more precisely by its topic comment properties. It articulates a formal model where the morphosyntactic properties result from this information structure trigger. Furthermore it shows that not only does the model correctly account for the split case and agreement properties of the Inuit language, but also other relevant properties discussed in the literature, i.e., scope properties of objects and aspect. It is also argued that objects in this language are introduced through an applicative head (Basilico 2012), after which they either topicalize or get assigned oblique case.
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