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This article identifies and tests a novel diagnostic for clause structure in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language with ergative alignment. The diagnostic concerns an unusual construction involving multiple wh-agreement in relative clauses. I argue that wh-agreement morphology uniformly tracks agreement with a wh-trace, and sentences with more than one instance of wh-agreement are surface manifestations of a parasitic gap dependency. Once multiple wh-agreement is understood in this theoretically familiar light, it can be used as a powerful tool for diagnosing asymmetries between various constituents in the West Circassian clause. By appealing to well-known constraints on parasitic gap licensing, the article demonstrates that the absolutive DP raises to a position c-commanding other clausemate DPs, and applied objects may undergo optional scrambling to a position above the ergative agent.

Reflexivity expresses itself in various ways across languages. Some languages uses nominal reflexives like English and other languages express reflexivity by marking on the predicate like polysynthetic languages. Interestingly, there are languages employ both nominal and the verbal reflexives like Telugu and Kannada. In languages that use both the nominal reflexive system and the verbal reflexive system, the verbal reflexive system preempts the reflexive interpretation process. In situations where the verbal reflexive system fails, the nominal reflexive system takes charge of the reflexive interpretation. Thus, both systems exist independently in natural languages and the reflexivity resides on nominal reflexives as well as on verbal reflexives.

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions, large irregular inflectional paradigms, and bipartite stem verbs, which all pose interesting challenges to the learner, as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity, which broadly includes factors such as transparency, predictability/regularity, richness, type/token frequency and productivity, must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.

Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia) is typologically unusual in having a single applicative construction with the semantics of source/malefactive, but never benefactive. In this paper I discuss the development of this applicative from an incorporated body part meaning ‘hand’. I show that the applicative developed from a reanalysis of the external possession construction; and that the applicative morphology developed from the incorporated body part, rather than from a verbal or adpositional source. This contributes to our understanding of the typology of applicative constructions and also highlights the value in exploring the complex verbal constructions of polysynthetic languages to inform our understanding of grammaticalisation possibilities.

West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with.

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive inflection in child-directed speech, the child overwhelmingly produces a possessive construction that circumvents this morphology. This construction, named here the equational possessive strategy (EPS), is largely undescribed in existing literature but is the primary mechanism for the child to express possession. These findings have potential implications for the cross-linguistic acquisition of possessive morphology and the connections between child-directed speech and child language production.

Low-resource polysynthetic languages pose many challenges in NLP tasks, such as morphological analysis and Machine Translation, due to available resources and tools, and the morphologically complex languages. This research focuses on the morphological segmentation while adapting an unsupervised approach based on Adaptor Grammars in low-resource setting. Experiments and evaluations on Inuinnaqtun, one of Inuit language family in Northern Canada, considered a language that will be extinct in less than two generations, have shown promising results.

This paper reviews the definitions and operationalisations of the notion of “polysynthesis” proposed in the typological literature and applies them to Lithuanian (verbal) morphology. It is shown that while Lithuanian falls short of polysynthesis in terms of morphemes-to-words ratio and lacks such features as polypersonalism and incorporation, it still possesses certain properties associated with polysynthesis. These include the so-called lexical affixes (it is argued that Lithuanian verbal prefixes are an example of these) and, to a limited extent, “productive non-inflectional concatenation”, i.e. morphemes with a high combinatory potential and compositional meanings, including successively applying verbalisers and nominalisers. These observations not only shed novel light on some well-known facts of Lithuanian grammar, but also further underscore the multifactorial and vague nature of polysynthesis.

This paper describes the development of the first Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language spoken in the Bering Strait region. While the UD guidelines provided a general framework for our annotations, language-specific decisions were made necessary by the rich morphology of the polysynthetic language. Most notably, we annotated a corpus at the morpheme level as well as the word level. The morpheme level annotation was conducted using an existing morphological analyzer and manual disambiguation. By comparing the two resulting annotation schemes, we argue that morpheme-level annotation is essential for polysynthetic languages like St. Lawrence Island Yupik. Word-level annotation results in degenerate trees for some Yupik sentences and often fails to capture syntactic relations that can be manifested at the morpheme level. Dependency parsing experiments provide further support for morpheme-level annotation. Implications for UD annotation of other polysynthetic languages are discussed.

Definition modelling is the task of automatically generating a dictionary-style definition given a target word. In this paper, we consider cross-lingual definition generation. Specifically, we generate English definitions for Wolastoqey (Malecite-Passamaquoddy) words. Wolastoqey is an endangered, low-resource polysynthetic language. We hypothesize that sub-word representations based on byte pair encoding (Sennrich et al., 2016) can be leveraged to represent morphologically-complex Wolastoqey words and overcome the challenge of not having large corpora available for training. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach outperforms baseline methods in terms of BLEU score.

St. Lawrence Island Yupik (ISO 639-3: ess) is an endangered polysynthetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family indigenous to Alaska and Chukotka. This work presents a step-by-step pipeline for the digitization of written texts, and the first publicly available digital corpus for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, created using that pipeline. This corpus has great potential for future linguistic inquiry and research in NLP. It was also developed for use in Yupik language education and revitalization, with a primary goal of enabling easy access to Yupik texts by educators and by members of the Yupik community. A secondary goal is to support development of language technology such as spell-checkers, text-completion systems, interactive e-books, and language learning apps for use by the Yupik community., Comment: ComputEL-4

This paper describes a three-year project at the National Research Council of Canada aimed at developing software to assist Indigenous communities in their efforts to preserve their languages and extend their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where the linguistic goals of communities have at least equal weight with those of the researchers, and where collaboration with communities is central. Because many of the technological directions we took were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (a verb conjugator for Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family, was built in the framework), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), limited-domain text-to-speech synthesis for some Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects., Ce rapport technique décrit un projet de trois ans au Conseil national de recherches du Canada pour le développement de logiciels visant à soutenir les communautés autochtones dans leurs efforts de préservation et de revitalisation de leurs langues. Ce projet s’efforce de respecter le principe de l’autonomisation : l’importance accordée aux objectifs linguistiques des communautés est supérieure ou égale à celle accordée à ceux des chercheurs et la collaboration avec les communautés est centrale. Puisque beaucoup des orientations technologiques ont été choisies en réponse aux besoins des communautés, le projet a donné lieu à divers sous-projets, notamment : la création d’une plateforme pour créer des conjugueurs pour les langues polysynthétiques hautement flexionnelles (un conjugueur pour la langue iroquoienne kanyen'kéha a été développé à l’aide de cette plateforme); la publication d’un corpus bilingue inuktut–anglais, qui est probablement le plus grand corpus de phrases disponible pour une langue polysynthétique; un projet d’expérimentation de la traduction automatique entrainée sur ce corpus; des services en ligne gratuits basés sur la reconnaissance de la parole automatique pour soulager le goulot d’étranglement de la transcription des enregistrements en langues autochtones; un projet sur l’utilisation de la synthèse vocale à domaine restreint pour certaines langues autochtones; et plusieurs autres sous-projets.

There are great translation systems online. However, even though this technology is available for the majority of languages, it is not the case of Nahuatl [1]. For this reason, this paper outlines a master’s degree thesis proposal which is aimed to use a Neural Network for Translation with an attention mechanism and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) like the one used by Google [2]. In addition, it seeks to implement an artificial Text To Speech (TTS) system trained with a Neural Network with a given dataset of Mel spectrograms in [3] from a person speaking in Nahuatl and it attempts to achieve a natural voice output as a spectrogram, then process it and obtain the sound desired. Finally, once trained, these models can be prepared for being used within mobile devices, and even taking advantage of the neural engine some of them are equipped with. In this way, this technology can reach more people and help to preserve and even spread the language. The early results showed how the limited resources of this language could cause a strong bias in the outputs and also how there could be some loss of information given the morphemes Nahuatl has, given its polysynthetic nature. This also highlights the way it can be tokenized, playing an important role in how the results turn out obtaining a BLEU score of 0.34 at best. Finally, this application and research can be an interesting framework of how a polysynthetic language can be manipulated to be used for fusional languages like Spanish or English. This research work was carried out at the “Tecnologico Nacional de Mexico” (TecNM), campus of the “Instituto Tecnologico de Apizaco” (ITA)

Polysynthetic languages have exceptionally large and sparse vocabularies, thanks to the number of morpheme slots and combinations in a word. This complexity, together with a general scarcity of written data, poses a challenge to the development of natural language technologies. To address this challenge, we offer linguistically-informed approaches for bootstrapping a neural morphological analyzer, and demonstrate its application to Kunwinjku, a polysynthetic Australian language. We generate data from a finite state transducer to train an encoder-decoder model. We improve the model by “hallucinating” missing linguistic structure into the training data, and by resampling from a Zipf distribution to simulate a more natural distribution of morphemes. The best model accounts for all instances of reduplication in the test set and achieves an accuracy of 94.7% overall, a 10 percentage point improvement over the FST baseline. This process demonstrates the feasibility of bootstrapping a neural morph analyzer from minimal resources.

Text input technologies for low-resource languages support literacy, content authoring, and language learning. However, tasks such as word completion pose a challenge for morphologically complex languages thanks to the combinatorial explosion of possible words. We have developed a method for morphologically-aware text input in Kunwinjku, a polysynthetic language of northern Australia. We modify an existing finite state recognizer to map input morph prefixes to morph completions, respecting the morphosyntax and morphophonology of the language. We demonstrate the portability of the method by applying it to Turkish. We show that the space of proximal morph completions is many orders of magnitude smaller than the space of full word completions for Kunwinjku. We provide a visualization of the morph completion space to enable the text completion parameters to be fine-tuned. Finally, we report on a web services deployment, along with a web interface which helps users enter morphologically complex words and which retrieves corresponding entries from the lexicon.

Indigenous languages have been very challenging when dealing with NLP tasks and applications because of multiple reasons. These languages, in linguistic typology, are polysynthetic and highly inflected with rich morphophonemics and variable dialectal-dependent spellings; which affected studies on any NLP task in the recent years. Moreover, Indigenous languages have been considered as low-resource and/or endangered; which poses a great challenge for research related to Artificial Intelligence and its fields, such as NLP and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a study on the Inuktitut language through pre-processing and neural machine translation, in order to revitalize the language which belongs to the Inuit family, a type of polysynthetic languages spoken in Northern Canada. Our focus is concentrated on: (1) the preprocessing phase, and (2) applications on specific NLP tasks such as morphological analysis and neural machine translation, both for Indigenous languages of Canada. Our evaluations in the context of lowresource Inuktitut-English Neural Machine Translation, showed significant improvements of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art.

This paper describes the ongoing process of creating a computational morphological model of Plains Cree, a language native to North America, making use of finite-state machines, and with a focus on verbs. We cover prior linguistic theoretical and descriptive models of Plains Cree, moving on to the computational implementation of (chiefly) inflectional phenomena, followed by relevant morphophonological processes. We evaluate the performance of our computational implementation with a hand-verified corpus of Plains Cree, and present a discussion of the morphological complexity found in the corpus, as compared to that of our model and its theoretical underpinnings. The results of this evaluation and research into natural language use inform us about the practical extent of morphological complexity for a polysynthetic language, and allow us to identify avenues for improvement of the model. Finally, this computational model for Plains Cree offers the opportunity to create various digital tools and applications for language users for the maintenance and revitalization of this language in the 21st century.

The paper presents a description and an analysis of the nominal complex, a peculiar construction which includes a noun and its modifiers, in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language of the Northwest Caucasian family. The nominal complex shows properties of a single word and tends to follow the template proposed for the word in West Circassian. However, its parts may themselves have a complex structure based on a similar template. This is argued to result from a principle that requires these subparts to be interpreted without appealing to a broader morphological context. In addition, the nominal complex may contain complex syntactic constituents as its proper parts. It is shown that the nominal complex in West Circassian is currently undergoing demorphologization and syntacticization.

In dementia in inflecting and agglutinating languages, morphosyntax is much better preserved than lexical access or pragmatics, but little is known about how dementia affects language in polysynthetic agglutinating languages with their complex verb morphology. Fortuitously, a series of narratives by a skilled Arapaho storyteller includes sessions from late in his life, when he was evidently dementing. Verb forms and clausal connectors in the speaker’s Arapaho predementia and dementia narratives were sorted computationally and analyzed statistically. We found a decline in subordination and an increase in utterances missing verbs. There was a shift from using transitive active verb forms toward impersonal and passive verb forms, which require less pragmatic and syntactic computation to deploy, and a shift in subordination markers away from those requiring explicit consideration of the temporal relations between clauses.

Morphological segmentation of words is the process of dividing a word into smaller units called morphemes; it is tricky especially when a morphologically rich or polysynthetic language is under question. In this work, we designed and evaluated several Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models as well as various other machine learning based approaches for the morphological segmentation task. We trained our models using annotated segmentation lexicons. To evaluate the effect of the training data size on our models, we decided to create a large hand-annotated morphologically segmented corpus of Persian words, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first and the only segmentation lexicon for the Persian language. In the experimental phase, using the hand-annotated Persian lexicon and two smaller similar lexicons for Czech and Finnish languages, we evaluated the effect of the training data size, different hyper-parameters settings as well as different RNN-based models.

Ket is one of the most enigmatic polysynthetic languages in North Asia. The majority of structural features complicating a clear-cut typological analysis of Ket are due to the long-term contact with the languages of a radically different type that resulted in a peculiar process of structural mimicry (or ‘typological accommodation’ in Vajda’s (2017) terms). The mimicry is most evident in the verbal morphology, which is traditionally regarded as almost exclusively prefixing. While this is true for the oldest layer of verbs with the main lexical root in the final position, Ket’s most productive patterns of verb formation clearly imitate suffixal agglutination typical of the surrounding languages by placing the main lexical root in the initial position with the rest of morphemes following it. This presentation aims to demonstrate that this phenomenon is also attested at the syntactic level. Prototypical polysynthetic languages are largely devoid of overt subordination (cf. Baker 1996). Ket, however, signals adverbial subordination by using postposed relational morphemes attached to fully finite verbs. This pattern is common to adverbial clauses in the neighboring languages, the difference being that they attach relational morphemes to non-finite forms only. This functional-structural parallel is likewise attested in relative clauses. The surrounding languages share a common relativization pattern involving preposed participial relative clauses with a ‘gapped’ relativized noun phrase (Pakendorf 2012). This resembles the major relativization pattern in Ket, in which, however, preposed relative clauses are fully finite. Formation of adverbial and relative clauses in Ket clearly mimics that of the surrounding languages and does not conform to the expected ‘polysynthetic’ pattern. At the same time, Ket resists accommodating a participle-like morphology, which can be connected with the general tendency among polysynthetic languages not to have truly non-finite forms (cf. Nichols 1992).

This chapter discusses the properties of polysynthesis and noun incorporation in the languages of North America. Starting with the Humboldtian tradition, it discusses the history of the interrelation between polysynthesis and noun incorporation, especially in the context of North American languages. It also discusses the kinds of concepts that are encoded morphologically in polysynthetic languages, presenting details of Mattissen’s typological classification of polysynthesis. Contemporary analyses of noun incorporation and polysynthesis are discussed. In particular, we discuss Baker’s generative approaches to polysynthesis and noun incorporation, Mithun’s functionalist analysis of polysynthesis, and touch on Roberts’s microparametric approach to variation in the context of polysynthesis and noun incorporation. Central to all these discussions is the notion of whether polysynthesis and noun incorporation are obligatorily intertwined or not. While early research suggested that the two phenomena go hand-in-hand, especially in North America, more recent research shows they are not, a conclusion that has serious ramifications for the analysis of these two phenomena. The chapter ends with an outlook for future research on the topics raised here.

In this paper, we introduce a morphologically-aware electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. Implemented using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, the dictionary is set in an uncluttered interface and permits users to search in Yupik or in English for Yupik root words and Yupik derivational suffixes. For each matching result, our electronic dictionary presents the user with the corresponding entry from the Badten (2008) Yupik-English paper dictionary. Because Yupik is a polysynthetic language, handling of multimorphemic word forms is critical. If a user searches for an inflected Yupik word form, we perform a morphological analysis and return entries for the root word and for any derivational suffixes present in the word. This electronic dictionary should serve not only as a valuable resource for all students and speakers of Yupik, but also for field linguists working towards documentation and conservation of the language.

The adaptation of neural approaches to NLP is a landmark achievement that has called into question the utility of linguistics in the development of computational systems. This research proposal consequently explores this question in the context of a neural morphological analyzer for a polysynthetic language, St. Lawrence Island Yupik. It asks whether incorporating elements of Yupik linguistics into the implementation of the analyzer can improve performance, both in low-resource settings and in high-resource settings, where rich quantities of data are readily available.

Background: Polysynthetic languages can be roughly defined as languages which have an extreme morphological complexity. They present a range of challenges to linguistic and neurolinguistics...

Polysynthetic languages pose a challenge for morphological analysis due to the root-morpheme complexity and to the word class “squish”. In addition, many of these polysynthetic languages are low-resource. We propose unsupervised approaches for morphological segmentation of low-resource polysynthetic languages based on Adaptor Grammars (AG) (Eskander et al., 2016). We experiment with four languages from the Uto-Aztecan family. Our AG-based approaches outperform other unsupervised approaches and show promise when compared to supervised methods, outperforming them on two of the four languages.

Morphological analysis is a critical enabling technology for polysynthetic languages. We present a neural morphological analyzer for case-inflected nouns in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered polysythetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family, treating morphological analysis as a recurrent neural sequence-to-sequence task. By utilizing an existing finite-state morphological analyzer to create training data, we improve analysis coverage on attested Yupik word types from approximately 75% for the existing finite-state analyzer to 100% for the neural analyzer. At the same time, we achieve a substantially higher level of accuracy on a held-out testing set, from 78.9% accuracy for the finite-state analyzer to 92.2% accuracy for our neural analyzer.

Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device to signal the higher-level groupings of grammatical constituents in the discourse. What is interesting in these findings is that, despite the multiple grammatical constructions available to signal subordination in Dalabon, grammatical subordination is infrequently used. Instead, Dalabon speakers make use of intonation to group two or more verbs, in order to represent the close temporal relationship of events. The close examination of multi-verb intonational units presented in this paper may reveal more about the interaction between intonation and syntactic organiz...

Construction Grammar is a model of grammar which makes a virtue out of treating morphological and syntactic constructions as varieties of essentially the same ontological type, which is also the type of words in general: a lexical entry. I argue that this kind of model is exactly what we need to describe the otherwise troublesome behaviour of polysynthetic languages. In particular, this model enables us to derive the kind of prosodic constituency and semantic interpretation which is otherwise completely unexpected for words.

Morphological segmentation for polysynthetic languages is challenging, because a word may consist of many individual morphemes and training data can be extremely scarce. Since neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models define the state of the art for morphological segmentation in high-resource settings and for (mostly) European languages, we first show that they also obtain competitive performance for Mexican polysynthetic languages in minimal-resource settings. We then propose two novel multi-task training approaches -one with, one without need for external unlabeled resources-, and two corresponding data augmentation methods, improving over the neural baseline for all languages. Finally, we explore cross-lingual transfer as a third way to fortify our neural model and show that we can train one single multi-lingual model for related languages while maintaining comparable or even improved performance, thus reducing the amount of parameters by close to 75%. We provide our morphological segmentation datasets for Mexicanero, Nahuatl, Wixarika and Yorem Nokki for future research., Comment: Long Paper, 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

This paper describes a group of derivational verbal suffixes in Abaza, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. For each suffix I propose a short description of its most remarkable features. In particular, I discuss the polysemy of the refactive and assertive markers and their interaction with the event structure of the verb. Other suffixes such as the putative and inferential markers are interesting due to their peculiar morphological behavior. The diversity of the discussed affixes is tentatively explained by the different pathways of their morphological and semantic development.

While we agree with Baker (2009) that noun incorporation (NI) is not a unified phenomenon cross-linguistically, we argue against his claim that head movement is still needed for NI in a number of languages (including Mohawk and Mapudungun). Our proposal is that NI involves phrasal movement. The motivation behind our proposal is that incorporated nominals can be much larger than bare roots with a structure incompatible with head movement. The empirical foundation for the phrasal movement claim comes primarily from Onondaga (qua Northern Iroquoian) and Ojibwe (qua Algonquian). In these languages, incorporated nouns appear with nominalizers and inflectional morphemes violating Baker’s (1996, 2003) Proper Head Movement Generalization. Our proposal about NI has important theoretical ramifications: while it has been popular to build words in polysynthetic languages in the syntax via head movement, we view “wordhood” and the polysynthetic properties of such languages as a phonological phenomenon (Dechaine 1999; Branigan et al. 2005; Compton and Pittman 2010).

This paper describes the process of designing, administering, and assessing a language-sensitive and culture-specific lexical test of Labrador Inuttitut (a dialect of Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language). This process presented numerous challenges, from choosing citation forms in a polysynthetic language to dealing with a lack of word frequency data. Twenty heritage receptive bilinguals (RBs) with very limited production skills in Inuttitut (their first language) and a comparison group of eight fluent bilinguals (FBs) participated in our study. Since the RBs lacked production skills in Inuttitut, the lexical test required participants to translate a carefully compiled list of Inuttitut nouns and verbs into English. The results revealed that RBs had good comprehension of basic vocabulary (85% accuracy), but differed significantly from FBs, mostly because the RBs had a number of partially accurate translations. The three lowest scoring RBs had the highest number of such translations as well as inaccurate translations based on phonological associations, as is common in emergent lexicons. This lexical test correlates with grammatical proficiency measures, pointing to its potential value as a quick placement and diagnostic test in revitalization programs for Inuttitut as well as other languages in a language loss situation.

This chapter reports on initial findings of an ongoing large-scale research project into the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of the Northern Territory of Australia with complex morphology. The complex verbal structures in Murrinhpatha, which can contain a large number of morphemes and bipartite stem morphology discontinuously distributed throughout the verbal template, raise a multitude of questions for acquisition. In this chapter we focus particularly on the acquisition of the complex predicate system in the verb, and the acquisition of subject-marking categories and tense/aspect/mood. Our findings are based on the language development of five Murrinhpatha acquiring children aged from 2;7–4;11 years.

Lowland Amazonia is the locus of substantial linguistic diversity in terms of genetic affiliation, language structure, and numbers of languages. This chapter will focus on the distribution of types of polysynthetic patterns within Lowland Amazonia, with special attention to the spread, and the types, of noun incorporation. The highest concentration of polysynthetic languages in Amazonia is the region south of the Amazon River, spanning adjacent regions of Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Polysynthetic patterns can be reconstructed for the protolanguages of some families, such as Panoan, Harakmbet, and possibly Arawá. Polysynthetic patterns in Arawak family (by far the largest in terms of its geographical spread) are often due to areal diffusion. We will focus on a number of mechanisms for the development of polysynthesis in established linguistic areas, for example the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area, and on a number of established instances of intensive language contact.

Tariana, the only Arawak language spoken in the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area, has developed numerous polysynthetic patterns, as a result of areal diffusion neighbouring East Tucanoan languages. Tariana is spoken in a situation of obligatory societal multilingualism, based on linguistic exogamy. Special features of Tariana shared with other polysynthetic languages include variable order of morphemes, ‘recursive affixing’ (similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages), templatic structures of nouns and verbs, and multiple serial verb constructions which behave as single word structures with respect to derivational processes. Most of these patterns are absent from Baniwa and other closely related Arawak languages, and also from one of the two extant dialects of Tariana under strong influence from Baniwa.

This chapter shows Eastern Canadian Arctic Inuktitut words are formed and used in the context of polysynthesis. It starts with a very basic classification of word-types along distributional lines: how various categories of morphemes combine or don’t combine with the same or other categories, in order to generate various types of words. On the basis of a number of examples, it will be shown that the lexicalization of morphemic groupings lies at the core of the Inuktitut lexicon. In contemporary language usage, this process of lexicalization may be either covert or overt. When covert, the combined meaning conveyed by the addition of each original morpheme in a word is mostly imperceptible to modern speakers, the only semantic function of the lexicalized word being to signify its new denotatum. When overt, however, it can serve as a powerful tool for creating new words apt at describing a world in constant change.

Polysynthesis presupposes the existence of ‘words’, a domain or unit of phonology and syntax that is extremely variable within and across languages: what behaves as a ‘word’ with respect to one phonological or syntactic rule or constraint may not behave as such with respect to other rules or constraints. Here we develop a system of variables that allows cataloguing all verb-based domains in a language in a bottom-up fashion and then determining any potential convergence of domains in an empirical way. We apply the system to case studies of Mapudungun and Chintang. These confirm earlier observations that polysynthetic languages do not operate with unified units of type ‘word’ in either phonology or syntax.

This handbook offers an extensive cross-linguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part II contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while Part IV looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, Part V contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.

This chapter describes what happens at the structural level to polysynthetic languages during language obsolescence, attrition, and loss. The changes that take place in decaying polysynthetic languages should be distinguished from (a) those occurring in all obsolescent languages regardless of their type, and (b) changes in “healthy” polysynthetic languages. It is shown that the consequences of polysynthetic language decay are primarily manifested in the collapse of morphological complexity, involving the loss of morphological ‘slots’, the reduction in the number of bound morphemes and their substitution by free ones, the ‘fossilization’ of markers and their reanalysis, the deprivation of word formation productivity, the destruction of noun incorporation, and reduction of allomorphy.

Purepecha (language isolate, Mexico) has one relevant characteristic that leads to identifying it as a polysynthetic language: productive verbal morphology (in particular locative suffixes). Purepecha is a predominantly dependent-marking language, as its pronominal markers are enclitics, generally second position enclitics. But, in some contexts Purepecha shows head-marking characteristics. Today, pronominal enclitics exhibit variation, tending to move to the rightmost position in the clause; they may encliticize to the predicate itself, showing a head-attraction or polypersonalism strategy and making Purepecha more polysynthetic. But this language lacks noun incorporation. Purepecha has three types of non-finite clause: two subordinate clauses (non-finite complement clauses and purpose clauses) and a syntactically independent clause (the chain-medial clause). This seemingly inconsistent situation (characterized by a correlation of different properties, some of which have not been identified as polysynthetic) calls for addressing the typological classification of Purepecha among the polysynthetic languages.

One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially more challenging, when the child is learning a polysynthetic language – a language in which words are highly morphologically complex, expressing in a single word what in English takes a multi-word clause. To date, there has been no cross-linguistic survey of how children approach thispuzzle and learnpolysynthetic languages.Thispaperaimstoprovide suchasurvey, including a discussion of some of the general findings in the literature regarding the acquisition of polysynthetic systems.

This paper argues that denominal verb formation in Ojibwe is similar to nominal incorporation: a complex nominal (containing inflectional and derivational affixes) incorporates into a verb. This process differs from denominalization in languages such as English where denominal verbs are the result of the concatenation of derivational affixes and nouns that are simple roots. This paper contributes to ongoing discussion on the composition of words in polysynthetic languages, the nature of nominal incorporation, and the relationship between morphology and syntax.[KEYWORDS: denominal verbs, nominal incorporation, Ojibwe, Algonquian]

This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker’s (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) transitivity hypothesis , since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.