Remarks on a west greenlandic verbal paradigm

Eskimo languages, as is well known, are ergative-absolutive .with respect to the case marking of the nominal terms of the clause: there is a special morphological case that marks the agent of a transitive clause, while the object of the transitive and the subject of an intransitive are in a different case. The case of the transitive agent is traditionally called the relative in Greenlandic studies (following Kleinschmidt 1968 (1851)), but I will refer to it as the ergative, since that is the term that is now more generally used in typological studies. The case of the transitive object and intransitive subject is the absolutive.