Conference article

Disambiguating homonymous enclitics in Greenlandic

Liv Molich
Oqaasileriffik / The Language Secretariat of Greenland, Greenland

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Published in: Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2019 Workshop on Constraint Grammar - Methods, Tools and Applications, 30 September 2019, Turku, Finland

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 168:5, p. 19-22

NEALT Proceedings Series 43:5, p. 19-22

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Published: 2019-12-03

ISBN: 978-91-7929-918-7

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

In Greenlandic ambiguities are very common. Some of them concern enclitics which are widely used and can be interpreted as both conjunctional and adverbial particles. The disambiguation of such homographic enclitics was not attempted before 2018, even though a Greenlandic constraint grammar (CG) was initiated more than a decade ago. In this paper I shall deal with the disambiguational challenges of enclitic particles and discuss where the disambiguation rules should be placed in the CG, and show how some disambiguation problems can be solved by looking at the combination of inflection and enclitic. This is an important issue, because different renderings of enclitics – like many other morphemes – can change the syntax of the sentence completely.

Keywords

Constraint grammar, Disambiguation, Ambiguity, Enclitics, Greenlandic

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