An examination of the circumstances under which a speaker chooses one of three possible Inuktitut sentence types containing both subject and object. This volume also includes a grammatical outline of the North Baffin Island dialect.

The culmination of forty years of research, The Language of the Inuit maps the geographical distribution and linguistic differences between the Eskaleut and Inuit languages and dialects. Providing details about aspects of comparative phonology, grammar, and lexicon as well as Inuit prehistory and historical evolution, Louis-Jacques Dorais shows the effects of bilingualism, literacy, and formal education on Inuit language and considers its present status and future. An enormous task, masterfully accomplished, The Language of the Inuit is not only an anthropological and linguistic study of a language and the broad social and cultural contexts where it is spoken but a history of the language's speakers.

An archival and ethnographic account of Coast Tsimshian feast traditions with emphasis on their role as forms of discourse shaped by idiosyncratic textual conventions.

Literary and morphemic translations of eight Nassilingmiut (Central Arctic Inuit) myths are provided.

An examination of the role of play in Inuit society with respect to the creation, maintenance, and internalization of social values.

A collection of forty-one Inuit songs from Eskimo Point, Northwest Territories, featuring three genres: ajajait (personal songs), animal songs, and songs sung by children playing games.

The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties, and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages. The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order. The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families.