The native language of Eskimo people who live in the coastal and inland regions of the Lower Yukon, Kuskokwim, and Bristol Bay areas of Southwestern Alaska is presented in this grammar of Central Yup'ik. Written in a clear, concise, and readable style, this volume is not only a comprehensive textbook for students, but also a complete reference guide. It takes the student from beginning lessons to an advanced grammatical level. It is appropriate for the college and high school levels, and for self study.

The purpose of this workbook is to provide learners of Yugcetun (the Yup'ik language) with a tangible guide into the use of A Practical Grammar of the Central Alaskan Yup'ik Language published by Steve Jacobson in 1995.

The volume is a major grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY). It is the culmination of the author's linguistic studies done in Alaska and elsewhere since around 1960, with assistance of many native speakers. Central Alaskan Yupik is currently the most vigorous of the nineteen remaining Native Alaskan languages. Descriptive in nature, extensive and deep, this grammar is of typological and of ethnological/anthropological interest. Given the severely endangered state of the language, this much of descriptive linguistic material is without comparison in the field.

This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in general linguistic terms, particularly with regard to polysynthesis. The degree of variation from more to less polysynthesis is evaluated within Eskaleut (Inuit-Yupik vs. Aleut), even in previously insufficiently explored domains such as pragmatics and use in context – including language contact and learning situations – and over typologically related language families such as Athabascan, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Iroquoian, Uralic, and Wakashan.

This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students how to understand, analyse and describe syntactic phenomena in different languages. The book covers every aspect of syntax from the basics to more specialised topics, such as clitics which have grammatical importance but cannot be used in isolation, and negation, in which a construction contradicts the meaning of a sentence. The approach taken combines concepts from different theoretical schools, which view syntax differently. These include M. A. K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the stratificational school advocated by Sydney Lamb, and Kenneth L. Pike's tagmemic model. The emphasis of the book is on syntactic structures rather than linguistic meaning, and the book stresses the difference between a well-formed sentence and a meaningful one. The final chapter brings these two aspects together, to show the connections between syntax and semology. Each chapter concludes with exercises from a diverse range of languages and a list of major technical terms. The book also includes a glossary as an essential resource for students approaching this difficult subject for the first time.