Viewpoint Aspect in Inuktitut: The Syntax and Semantics of Antipassives

• Main Author: Bettina Spreng
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: inuktitut
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.474.8103; http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~bspreng/Thesis Viewpoint Aspect.pdf

In many languages, antipassive morphology is comprised of aspectual morphology (Polinsky 2008). This thesis presents an analysis of the syntax and semantics of antipassives in Inuktitut by exploring the link between aspectual morphology and antipassive morphology. It resolves the longstanding question as to the factors governing the distribution of the antipassive morpheme, showing that the presence of the antipassive morpheme is determined by the meaning of the construction, i.e. it does not merely change the grammatical function. It is proposed that the antipassive construction has imperfective viewpoint in contrast to the ergative construction. Antipassive morphology is obligatory with punctual telic verbs, i.e. achievements, which are verbs that have perfective viewpoint by default. Antipassive morphology is thus necessary to convey imperfective viewpoint for verbs that are by default perfective. Using a modified Reichenbachian (Reichenbach 1947) framework, it is shown that imperfective viewpoint does not allow for telic interpretations. Instead, punctuality iii