The Role of Case in Kalaallisut Relativization

Reporting on in-progress work with Kalaallisut speakers Naja Blytmann-Trondhjem, Agnes Johnsen, Grethe Schmidt, Pia Svendsen and Ellen Thrane, as well as linguist Emily Clem (UCSD).

Kalaallisut (Inuit, Greenland) famously does not allow relativization of transitive subjects. This has been assumed to be an instance of the Ergative Extraction Constraint (EEC). In the first part of this talk, we demonstrate that it is also not possible to relativize on any oblique DPs nor possessors. In place of the EEC, we therefore propose an absolutive only constraint on relativization in the language: all and only absolutive DPs can be relativized on. In the second part, we show that most existing accounts of the EEC (inversion, anti-locality, mauraudering) cannot capture this "abs-only" restriction. It is, by contrast, straightforwardly captured under a Case discrimination account. A Case discrimination account, however, fails to link the abs-only extraction pattern to any independent facts in the language, leaving it somewhat stipulative. In the final part of the talk we sketch an alternative account that rests on two independent facts: i) relative clauses are structurally reduced and ii) the head of a relative clause, no matter its position. exhibits External Case (i.e. the Case the DP containing the relative clause is assigned in the matrix clause). Under this alternative analysis the source of the ungrammaticality of relativizing on a non-absolutive DP is not a ban on extraction of non-absolutive DPs, but the fact that in such configurations, the absolutive DP left behind fails to be Case licensed.