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West Greenlandic ("Kalaallisut") is a language of the Inuit branch of Eskimo spoken by about 45,000 people on the West Coast of Greenland. There is near hundred percent literacy and there is a flourishing literary tradition of all genres in the native language. Grammatically, West Greenlandic is typical of Inuit. Verbs and nouns are both highly inflected and there is an very unusually rich system of derivation in both categories. There are about 500 fully productive derivational affixes altogether, all of which are semantically transparent and some of which are syntactically transparent. The case marking is ergative and the syntax verb final. This sketch of the grammar of West Greenlandic is descriptive and non-technical in tone, but adheres to the principles of Autolexical Syntax in radically separating syntax, morphology, and semantics . In each of these components no mention is made of information belonging to the others. Rather, there is a separate chapter on matching and mismatching of structures across components. The aim is both to make the basic structure of West Greenlandic clear to the general reader and to demonstrate that a grammar consisting of autonomous modules connected by a lexically centered interface is both feasible and illuminating. ISBN 3 8958C 2 A Grammar of Kalaallisut (We t Greenlandic lnuttut} Jerrold M. Sa dock . I L/NCOM EUROPA academicpubUcaUons Languages of the World/Materials A Grammar of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic lnuttut) Jerrold M. Sadock Languages of the World/Materials 162 2003 LINCOM EUROPA Published by LIN COM GmbH 2003. Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Introductory Remarks 1.1 Literature 1.2 Orthography 1.3 Pronunciation 1 2. Morphology 2.1 Words 2.2 Stems 2.3 Types of Affixes 2.4 Notation 2.5 The Structure of the Word 2.6 Morphological Subcategories.2.6.1 Nominal and verbal stems. 2.6.2 Homophony of stems. 2.6.3 Morphological particles. 2.6.4 Transitive and intransitive forms 2.7 Inflectional Morphology. 2.7.1 Person and number. 2.7.2 Internal and External Person. 2.7.3 Nominal inflection 2. 7.4 Verbal Inflection 2.8 Derivational Morphology. 2.8.1 Part-of-Speech Classes 2.8.2 Reconversion. 2.8.3 Length of words. 2.8.4 Transitivity Classes 2.9 Clltics 2.10 Derivational Clitlcs 2.11 Subclasses of Stems. 2.11.1 Nominal Stems. 2.11.2 Verbal Stems 2.12 Compounds 3 3.Morphophonology 3.1 Productive Affixes. 3.2 NuU SuffiXes. 3.3 Interaction at Boundaries. 3.4 Stem Variation. 3.5 Stem Selection. 3.5.1 Full and vocalic stem forms . 3.5.2 Factors influencing full vs. vocalic stem selection 3.6 Affix Variation. 3.6.1 Variable initial cluster. 3.6.2 Initial /G/ and /J/. 3.6.3 Continuant/stop alternation. 3.7 Nominal Inflection. 3.7.1 Geminating stems 3.7.2 Clustering Stems. 3.7.3 Additional classes in the ergative and plural. 3.7.4 Tabular summary of noun classes 3.8 Verbal Inflection. 3.8.1 Negation. 3.8.2 Verbs in final -E. 3.8.3 Future (-ssa-). 3.9 Special Derivational Forms of Verbs. 3.9.1 Antipassive. 3.9.2 The Active and passive participles. 3.10 Varia. 3.10.1 Replacive suffixation. 3.10.2 Assibilation. 3.10.3 Vowel lengthening. 3.10.4 Special stem alternates. 12 Ill II 4. Phonology 4.1 Constraints on the Phonological Content of Words 4. 2 Automatic Phonology. 4.2.1 Vowel lowering. 4.2.2 Sequences of vowels 4.2.3 Sequences of consonants 20 5. Syntax 5.0 Syntactic Categories 5.1 Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases 5.2 Noun Phrase Categories 5.3 Verb Phrase Categories 5.4 The Clause. 5.4.1 Verbal clauses. 5.4.2 Verbless independent clauses. 5.4.3 Order of the principal constituents of the clause. 5.4.4 Sentence fragments 5.5lnteroal Structure of the NP. 5.5.1 Basic structure. 5.5.2 Modifiers. 5.5.3 Determination. 5.5.