An introduction to Kalaallisut, the typologically extreme Inuit language
of 50,000 people in West Greenland and Denmark. The course will be organized around the productive morphological system of derivations, inflections and clitics, and will discuss the relation of morphology to the syntax and to the semantics. Noun and verb incorporation will be taken up in detail, while other morphological processes and their connections to syntactic and semantic organization will be more briefly considered.
The morphological exuberance of Inuit languages is not a mere theoretical possibility, but plays a central role in their creative communicative apparatus. To give students a clear idea of how the morphology is actually deployed, part of one day each week will be devoted to analyzing a "simple" text, most likely a reading intended for the lower grades.
Materials will include my 2003 booklet, A Grammar of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic Inuttut), Munich: Lincom Europa, and a Kalaallisut – English dictionary that is being produced by scholars in Chicago and in Greenland. A preliminary version of the dictionary should be online by the time the course starts.