The lexicon of a polysynthetic language

西格陵兰语是格陵兰的国语，是一种因纽特语，与今天在阿拉斯加和加拿大使用的其他因纽特语密切相关。像许多其他北美语言一样，它的特点是极端的多合成：它的单词在形式或内容上都不固定，而是由词根和后缀组成的。在英语中被编码为单独单词的概念在多合成语言中往往被组合成一个很长的单词。这就提出了一些非常基本的理论问题，如单词概念在语法理论中的地位，多合成语言中构词过程的限制是什么，以及我们如何理解这种语言中的从句和句子等概念。不同的因纽特语在不同程度上将这些形式词汇化；格陵兰语表现出相对较少的这种形式的词汇化，这导致了哪些应该被纳入词典，哪些可以通过理解它们的各个部分来理解的问题（就像英语词典不包括句子，但某些固定短语被包括在内）。该项目通过开发格陵兰语-英语数字词典来解决这些基本问题，旨在使我们对这些形式是如何产生的理解取得重大进展，包括构词法和词汇化的潜在过程，以及它们如何与语法相互作用。词典的数字格式将使我们能够包括文本，这些文本显示了这些句子类单词在更大的话语单元中的联系，以及它们如何锚定在产生它们的上下文中。这条研究路线将对我们理解人类语言多样性的范围以及语言产生和处理的能力产生重大见解。这一研究项目将受益于格陵兰研究人员的合作贡献，在这一国际合作的背景下，他们也将为这一项目将在实地工作和语言分析方面提供的宝贵的研究生培训机会作出贡献。

West Greenlandic, the national language of Greenland, is an Inuit language closely related to other Inuit languages spoken in Alaska and Canada today. Like many other North American languages, it is characterized by extreme polysynthesis: its words are not fixed in form or content, but are productively constructed out of roots and suffixes. Concepts which are encoded as separate words in English tend to be combined into one very long word in polysynthetic languages. This raises very fundamental theoretical questions as to what status the notion of a word has in grammatical theory, what are the limits of word-formation processes in polysynthetic languages, and how we understand concepts like clause and sentence in such a language. The different Inuit languages lexicalize these forms to varying degrees; Greenlandic exhibits relatively little lexicalization of such forms, leading to the issue of which should be included in a dictionary and which can be understood by understanding their individual parts (much as sentences are not included in an English dictionary but certain set phrases are). This project addresses these fundamental issues through the development of a Greenlandic-English digital lexicon and aims to make significant progress in our understanding of how such forms are created, including the underlying processes of word formation and lexicalization and how these interact with grammar. The digital format of the lexicon will enable us to include texts which show the linkage of such sentence-like words into larger discourse units and how they are anchored to the context in which they are produced. This line of inquiry will produce major insights into our understanding of the range of human linguistic diversity and the capacity of linguistic production and processing. This research project will benefit from collaborative contributions from Greenlandic researchers who, in the context of this international collaboration, will also contribute to the valuable graduate training opportunities that this project will provide in fieldwork and linguistic analysis.