Ergativity and Change in Inuktitut

Johns, Alana

doi:10.1007/1-4020-4188-8_12

Cited by 171 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Johns (2006) describes the antipassive and inceptive morphemes in Inuktitut as a single set of features that can be merged in different structural positions with different consequences; in the same way, there may be a single Event morpheme encoding dynamicity that can be merged either in Infl or in v . If this is the case, then Inuktitut could lack Event on Infl because this feature is merged into v instead.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the antipassive morpheme is analyzed as the spell‐out of a v head with accusative case features. However, this morpheme has also been claimed by many (Bittner 1987, Hayashi and Spreng 2005, Johns 2006) to have viewpoint aspectual features in addition to its case‐assigning properties.…”

Section: Non‐inflectional Aspect In Inuktitutmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…This, they claim, is a distinction of viewpoint aspect; while the ergative construction is perfective, the antipassive clause is imperfective. Johns (2006) also argues that the antipassive morpheme is a v morpheme that creates aspectual consequences for the clause. She claims that the antipassive morpheme is one manifestation of an indefinite quantifier that can be merged in various places in the structure; when merged into the v head, this feature is interpreted as the antipassive morpheme, giving an imperfective reading, but when merged higher, it is interpreted as inceptive 15 .…”

Section: Non‐inflectional Aspect In Inuktitutmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16 16 Johns (2006) claims that this single morpheme can be merged in two places with different consequences for the clause; this raises the question of whether a similar claim could be made for the feature Event. Is the Event feature that exists in v in Inuktitut the same as the Event feature in Infl in other languages?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The manifestation of viewpoint aspect in Inuktitut*

Clarke

2009

Studia Linguistica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article refutes the claim (Swift and Bohnemeyer 2004) that viewpoint aspect in Inuktitut is determined wholly by telicity. We claim that, in fact, Inuktitut lacks default viewpoint aspect altogether. This article follows Cowper (2005) and Kyriakaki (2006) in assuming that viewpoint aspect can be encoded with the morphosyntactic features Interval (imperfective aspect) and Moment (perfective aspect), which are possible dependents of the feature Event. We show that, while English has two past tense constructions, one of which is infelicitous with states because it spells out Interval, the dependent feature of Event, Inuktitut has only one. There is no tense construction in Inuktitut that is felicitous only with events, indicating that there is none that spells out a dependent of the feature Event. Other tests for perfectivity and imperfectivity prove inconclusive in Inuktitut; there is no evidence of a feature Interval or Moment. Thus, we conclude that no such feature exists. Therefore, all Inuktitut clauses are neither perfective nor imperfective, but simply unmarked with respect to viewpoint aspect. We further show that the locus of all aspectual variation in Inuktitut is little v, and that this variation relates to lexical aspect only, not viewpoint aspect.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Non‐inflectional Aspect In Inuktitutmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Non‐inflectional Aspect In Inuktitutmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The manifestation of viewpoint aspect in Inuktitut*

Clarke

2009

Studia Linguistica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…are optionally found outside the incorporated verb construction with default case -mik(Johns, 2006). These are appositional elements.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Additional facts about noun incorporation (in Inuktitut)

Johns

2009

Lingua

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Syntactic Ergativity

Polinsky

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This chapter presents the phenomenon of syntactic ergativity (SE), defined as the grouping of the absolutive subject and absolutive object into a natural class, to the exclusion of the ergative argument, with respect to A′‐movement. Two families of approaches to SE can be distinguished: those which place the explanatory burden on the derivation of the absolutive, and those which invoke the properties of the ergative expression to explain SE. For the first family of approaches, which include explanations based on locality and A′‐movement for case, the exclusion of the ergative from A′‐movement is a side effect of satisfying Case‐licensing needs of the absolutive. In the second type of approach, the restriction on A′‐movement of the ergative follows either from criterial freezing or from the adpositional‐phrase nature of the ergative. The approaches converge on the notion that ergative is an inherent case, assigned either by a verbal head or by an adposition selected by a v head.

show abstract

Ergativity and Change in Inuktitut

Cited by 171 publications

References 12 publications

The manifestation of viewpoint aspect in Inuktitut*

The manifestation of viewpoint aspect in Inuktitut*

Additional facts about noun incorporation (in Inuktitut)

Syntactic Ergativity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About