ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses largely on a detailed study in one particular area, namely the acquisition of the morphology of West Greenlandic Eskimo. Although acquisition studies of “exotic” languages like Eskimo may eventually warrant adjustment to some of the currently accepted basic parameters of child language development, they also represent a rich testing ground for hypotheses as to specific operating principles or strategies of an alleged universal kind. West Greenlandic, like all varieties of Eskimo, is a polysynthetic language and is typologically extreme in the number of productive bound affixes (otherwise called “suffixes” and “postbases”) that can be inserted between verbal or nominal stems and inflectional endings. It seemed clear that the acquisition of West Greenlandic morphology—and its related morphophonological rules, both of which are extremely rich—represented an area of considerable potential interest. Before commenting on N’s nominal inflections, one need to make a few remarks about noun classes in Greenlandic that are relevant to what follows.
