KAREN LANGGARD

ILISIMATUSARFIK University of Greenland

Inderivation in West Greenlandic in a diachronic perspective.

The paper will present data and conclusions from a pilot project where two samples of texts written in West Greenlandic are compared. The two samples will consist of newspaper articles from the last decades of the 19^th century and of newspaper articles from the last decades of the 20^th century. The project is to register examples of Noun Inderivation as well as Verb Inderivation (i. e. Noun Incorporation and Verb Incorporation), and then to consider whether some developments seem to have taken place (I am making the reservation "seem" because the two samples will only amount to some 50 pages each and only be drawn from one kind of texts): Do we find the same main kinds of inderivations? The same inderiving morphemes? – and with the same frequency, be it in comparison with the text corpus in toto, be it in comparison with the other inderiving morphemes? Are the structures nowadays more or less complex compared to those found a hundred years ago?