A pseudo-relative in Inuit
Michelle Yuan
August 2022
 

Despite their resemblance to subject relative clauses, pseudo-relatives are commonly analyzed as a nominal subject and clausal predicate of a small clause, with the 'gap' inside the clause being a null PRO controlled by the subject. Previous work on pseudo-relatives has almost entirely been restricted to European languages. Based on original fieldwork on (Eastern Canadian) Inuktitut, this paper argues for a pseudo-relative analysis of an understudied existential construction in Inuit. In this construction, an existential verb 'have' syntactically embeds a small clause, whose predicate is the incorporated control clause and whose subject is the nominal pivot of the existential. This analysis is motivated by strong structural parallels with pseudo-relatives in other languages, and is shaped by well-established morphosyntactic properties specific to Inuit. These findings thus reveal the cross-linguistic existence of pseudo-relatives, and further our (still limited) understanding of Inuit sentence-level syntax.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006763
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of WCCFL 40
keywords: syntax morphology incorporation pseudo-relatives inuit embedding, syntax
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