Book Description

The study provides a description of the verbal derivational suffixation, postinflectional derivation, enclitics, and particles of the Central Siberian Yupik Eskimo language as spoken on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska and on the coast of Chukotka, in the Soviet Union. It also shows how these elements participate in a network of four tightly-knit grammatical susbsystems (verbal derivational suffixation; discourse enclitics; inflectional verbs moods; and adverbial and conjunctional particles borrowed from Chukchi, a neighboring Paleo-Siberian language), presents implications of the relationships among these subsystems for the theory of autolexical syntax and the theory of language change (particularly concerning contact-induced morphological and syntactic change in a polysynthetic language), and documents the history and sociolinguistics of grammatical and lexical influence of Chukchi on the Eskimo and Bering Sea area. (MSE)