Details

General

Description and behaviour

Form and usage:

This is the 'half-transitivising' (HTR) morpheme, used to remove an explicit Patient from a divalent stem, so the stem can be given intransitive form without changing its meaning.

The authors of [MFSJLK10] hypothesise that this morpheme might be from a combination +{ðar}N + +{li}V with VC-deletion, i.e. dropping /arl/. However, this seems unlikely, given the meaning of this morpheme, since +{ðar}N precisely creates a noun that represents the Patient role of a stem, and therefore omits the Agent role. In terms of its meaning, it would be more logical, if the first morpheme were +{ðə}N, since that precisely creates a noun representing the Agent role (and drops the Patient role). We therefore do not record this morpheme as a combination here.

However, the authors of [MFSJLK10] also mentions a second meaning for this affix: 'undergo something detrimental'. They say this is more productive in the Yupik branch, but also mention cases of a combined affix {jiaq}, apparently containing the present morpheme, in West and East Canadian Inuktitut, that also seems to have this meaning. This meaning seems more compatible with the hypothesis that the present morpheme should be from +{ðar}N + +{li}V.

The authors of [MFSJLK10] also posit a hypothetical morpheme {*gi}, that might have been used in suppletion with the present affix, and which supposedly then is the source of the variant form {i} (or {-i}?)used on some consonant stems in some of the daughter languages; for example in Kalaallisut following /VVq/ and /əq/. However, they do not give a separate entry for this morpheme, so neither do we here.

Meanings and examples

Search the corpus for further examples.

References

• [MFSJLK10] Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson, Lawrence Kaplan (2010): Comparative Eskimo Dictionary (2ED).