INTONATION AND FOCUS IN WEST GREENLANDIC

• Main Author: Anja Arnhold
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: aleut; eskimo*; Eskimo–Aleut; greenlandic; inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.525.3080; http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/jun/workshop2007icphs/anjaarnhold-westgreenlandic-abs-rev.pdf

This contribution investigates the intonation of West Greenlandic, a language from the Inuit branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. More specifically, it concentrates on the question of focus realisation by means of intonation. Analysing this aspect of West Greenlandic grammar presents two main interests: It closes a gap in the existing research on this language and it contributes to the development of theories modelling intonation in general and the role of intonation in the expression of information structural categories in particular. Concerning the first objective, previous work on West Greenlandic has primarily concentrated on the complex morphological or syntactic properties of this language. There are a few preliminary studies of intonation in West Greenlandic, though none of them considers the effect of focus or any other information structural category. From the theoretical point of view, the study of this language, which differs substantially from the well-studied European languages, is extremely interesting: West Greenlandic does not have any stress or accent and is thus one of those languages that Jun classifies as “non-stress and non-lexical pitch-accent languages ” [1:445]. This group of languages has not been recognised in more traditional intonational typologies categorising languages as intonation languages (e.g., English), tone languages (e.g., Mandarin)