[Dissertation] A Grammar of Iñupiaq Morphosyntax

Description

This dissertation presents a reference grammar of the Malimiut Coastal dialect of Inupiaq (Eskimo-Aleut > Eskimo > Inuit), an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in northwestern Alaska (ISO codes ESK, IPK). Also known as Inupiatun, it is the language of the Inupiat people. The dissertation complements existing documentation of Inupiaq, filling gaps in our current understanding of Inupiaq. The data presented in dissertation is the result of five years of research, fieldwork and analysis. The aim is to contribute to comprehensive documentation of the Inupiaq language, with particular focus on morphosyntax. With approximately 2000 remaining speakers, mainly above 50 years of age, Inupiaq is endangered. Within the Inupiat community there is a strong commitment to language documentation and revitalization, driven by groups such as the Alaska Native Language Center and local school districts. The current work aims to provide a comprehensive description of the morphosyntax of the language to the Inupiat and academic communities. It uses the standard Inupiaq writing system (a modified Latin script) to make it accessible to the Inupiat community, as well as to allow for easier comparison with existing texts. Examples are also glossed in IPA for ease of use by linguists and other interested parties. After providing an introduction to the language and reviewing previous work, the dissertation describes Malimiut Inupiaq phonetics and phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, syntactic categories, wordhood, constituency, and syntax. A final chapter is devoted to discussing major findings. These include a previously undocumented phonological change in progress, the apparent shift of /.../ (Inupiaq 'r') to the American English /.../ in younger speakers and heritage learners. I argue that this has several interrelated causes, including age, Inupiaq literacy, declining Inupiaq usage, and the influence of English. The dissertation also documents case stacking in Inupiaq demonstrative adverbs and demonstrative pronouns, a phenomenon by which these words are marked with grammatical case twice. Though the process works differently for demonstrative adverbs and for demonstrative pronouns, both exhibit this double case marking, which is previously undocumented in Eskimo-Aleut. The existence of case stacking on adverbs is a particularly exciting discovery, because it challenges currently accepted theories of case stacking that motivate case stacking via argument structure. As adverbs are not a part of argument structure, it suggests another mechanism for multiple case stacking must be necessary. Although eastern members of the Inuit dialect chain have been much more extensively documented, many areas of Inupiaq grammar remain undocumented. This dissertation is the first to discuss a number of morphosyntactic topics specifically for Inupiaq, including argument status, clause-level and sentence-level constituency, types of predication, wordhood (phonological vs. morphological vs. syntactic), and clause combining. What arises out of exploring many of these topics is that there is a real need to separate morphology and syntax in Malimiut Inupiaq. It has often been assumed that because Inuit languages have so very much morphology — over 400 derivational suffixes alone — that morphology and syntax are one and the same in these languages. However, clause combining and constituency — among other phenomena - demonstrate that purely syntactic phenomena exist in the language.