Asymmetries between Passivization and Antipassivization in the Tarramiutut Subdialect of Inuktitut

This paper investigates some of the properties of passivization, antipassivization, and two types of causatives in the Tarramiutut subdialect of Inuktitut, within the Role and Reference Grammar framework. Data from the use of the floated quantifier, “atuniit”, as well as interclausal binding will be used to suggest that NPs which express arguments in constructions which, in their most canonical use, leave the argument unspecified behave as peripheral adjuncts. Since this is not the case with antipassives, undergoers in antipassive constructions behave as core arguments, rather than as peripheral adjuncts. This paper will also investigate the interaction between antipassivization and dative shift. The data will be used to argue that a “lexical intransitivization” account of antipassivization, which would claim that there is no undergoer in antipassive constructions, makes incorrect predictions. I will argue that the undergoer in antipassive constructions has a similar status to accusative undergoers in nominative/accusative languages. The strongest prediction that this paper can make is that the two types of voice alternations investigated in this paper are representative of the types of voice alternations which are available cross-linguistically. If this is true, than binding phenomena can be predicted based on the primary use of a construction.