Alana Johns

Grammar without speech production: The case of Labrador Inuttitut heritage receptive bilinguals

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.

Ergativity and Change in Inuktitut

Ergativity and Change in Inuktitut Alana Johns, Department of Linguistics University of Toronto 0 Introduction Ergativity is property of a language which treats the subject of an intransitive verb as identical in some grammatical fashion to the patient/theme argument of a transitive verb. Explanations for this patterning within generative grammar are many (see Manning 1996; Johns 2000 for an overview). It is also known that languages can change from nominative-accusative to ergative and vice-versa (see Dixon 1994). In light of accounts in generative grammar where ergativity is not a single property within universal grammar, e.g. Johns (1992); Bittner and Hale (1996a; 1996b), we expect that changes in ergativity will also vary, restricted by universal grammar. At the same time we expect that these changes will shed light on the overall nature of ergativity, as linguistic change highlights critical subsets of properties of a grammar. In this paper we will examine one language, Inuktitut, which has undergone a partial change, observable across dialects. As outlined in Johns (1999), ergative patterning is more predominant in Inuktitut dialects spoken in the west in than the more easterly dialects, especially Labrador Inuttut. In this paper we will examine in detail one aspect of that change, the properties of the antipassive construction. Johns (2001a; 2001b) argues that it is properties of the

Inuit Sea Ice Terminology in Nunavut and Nunatsiavut

This chapter provides a linguistic perspective on recent research by anthropologists and human geographers about indigenous sea ice terms in Nunavut and Nunatsiavut (Labrador), providing a basic introduction to pertinent linguistic properties of Inuktitut and arguing that they shed further light on Inuit sea ice knowledge. A number of sea ice terms from the largely unknown Utkuhiksalingmiut dialect are provided.

Eskimo‐Aleut Languages

This article provides an overview of some key properties of Eskimo-Aleut languages. It discusses the geographic range and number of speakers of these languages, some of which are seriously endangered. It also provides examples and discussion of the polysynthetic nature of some of these languages, where a single word can have the interpretation of a sentence. An intriguing property of the Aleut language is its anaphoric agreement, which provides challenges for syntactic analyses. Within Eskimo-Aleut, we find languages that seem to lack tense, while closely related members have a finely graded tense system.