The lexicon of a polysynthetic language

西格陵兰语（英语：West Greenlandic）是格陵兰的国语，是一种因纽特语，与现今阿拉斯加和加拿大使用的因纽特语密切相关。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。 在英语中被编码为单独单词的概念在多合成语言中倾向于组合成一个非常长的单词。这就提出了一些非常基本的理论问题，比如词的概念在语法理论中的地位是什么，在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样一种语言中的分句和句子等概念。不同的因纽特语言在不同程度上将这些形式词汇化;格陵兰语对这些形式的词汇化程度相对较低，这就导致了哪些形式应该被收录在词典中，哪些形式可以通过理解其各个部分来理解的问题（就像英语词典中不包括句子，但某些固定短语一样）。 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如何产生的理解取得重大进展，包括单词形成和词汇化的基本过程以及这些过程如何与语法相互作用。词典的数字格式将使我们能够包括这样的文本，这些文本显示了这些类似词典的词与更大的话语单位的联系，以及它们如何与产生它们的上下文相关联。这条调查线将产生重大见解，我们的理解范围内的人类语言多样性和语言生产和处理的能力。这一研究项目将受益于格陵兰研究人员的合作贡献，他们在这一国际合作的背景下，还将为这一项目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做出贡献。

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.