Leiden University Student Repository

Huijting, Tess (2024)

Polysynthesis through derivation: The semantics of verbalizers in West Greenlandic

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

In Inuit-Yupik languages (one branch of Inuit-Yupik-Unangan or ‘Eskimo-Aleut’), much of the structure traditionally associated with syntax is accomplished solely through bound suffixes. Over the past decades, it has been suggested that what unites these several hundred suffixes is their semantics, with Mithun (1999: 50) noting that Inuit-Yupik suffixes tend to be “more diffuse and/or general in their meaning than their root counterparts,” and Cook and Johns (2009: 156) arguing that they universally “do not add any kind of encyclopedic semantics [...], but merely quantify or restrict the semantics of the preceding stem.” This absence of polysemy and encyclopedic semantics is now widely considered a defining characteristic of Inuit-Yupik suffixes, and forms the foundation of modern theories on word formation in the languages. This thesis takes a different perspective, and argues that a lack of encyclopedic semantics cannot be considered a universal property of Inuit-Yupik suffixes....Show moreIn Inuit-Yupik languages (one branch of Inuit-Yupik-Unangan or ‘Eskimo-Aleut’), much of the structure traditionally associated with syntax is accomplished solely through bound suffixes. Over the past decades, it has been suggested that what unites these several hundred suffixes is their semantics, with Mithun (1999: 50) noting that Inuit-Yupik suffixes tend to be “more diffuse and/or general in their meaning than their root counterparts,” and Cook and Johns (2009: 156) arguing that they universally “do not add any kind of encyclopedic semantics [...], but merely quantify or restrict the semantics of the preceding stem.” This absence of polysemy and encyclopedic semantics is now widely considered a defining characteristic of Inuit-Yupik suffixes, and forms the foundation of modern theories on word formation in the languages. This thesis takes a different perspective, and argues that a lack of encyclopedic semantics cannot be considered a universal property of Inuit-Yupik suffixes. Based on corpus and elicitation data, it presents a detailed analysis of the semantics of nine verbalizers in West Greenlandic, and each of them is shown to add highly specific lexical content to the preceding root, posing a major issue for the aforementioned theories on word formation. As an alternative, it is proposed that these suffixes are exclusively derivational in nature, making Inuit-Yupik words no different from agglutatinatively-formed words in many other language families.Show less

Author

Huijting, Tess

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Audring, J.

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en