Aspects of certain intransitivizing postbases and of a transitivizing postbase in Labrador Inuttut

• Main Author: Beaudoin-Lietz, Christa A. M.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 1982
• Subjects: inuit; inuktitut; Inuttut
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/7757/; https://research.library.mun.ca/7757/1/Beaudoin-Lietz_Christina.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/7757/3/Beaudoin-Lietz_Christina.pdf

This study concerns itself with certain intransitivizing postbases and a transitivizing postbase in Labrador Inuttut, a dialect of Inuktitut currently spoken mostly in five settlements of the Labrador coast. A verb classification is provided, according to the possible combinations of the postbases under investigation with verbal stems. The verbs are selected from a dictionary of the Labrador dialect produced by Inuit: "Labrador Inuit Uqausingit"; all forms of the classification are elicited by consulting five native speakers. -- Aspects of intransitivizers and issues related to transitivity in some grammars of other Eastern Dialects of Inuktitut are presented. -- For Labrador Inuttut, the intransitivizing post bases and the transitivizing one are distinguished from other homonymous postbases, and their phonological form is established. The postbase analysis is followed by the verbal stem classification. This classification provides distributional patterns with respect to the co-occurrence of the postbases with verbal stems. It is observed that morphological categories show a tendency to coincide with major semantic categories of verbal stems.