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Shanley E.M. Allen. Aspects of Argument Structure in Inuktitut. In the series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1996. Pp. xvi + 244. US$79.00 (hardcover).

This book, a revision of the author's 1994 McGill University dissertation, is the first detailed description of language acquisition by young Inuktitut-speaking children. It is the result of a mammoth data-collecting effort, which appears to have been conducted extremely carefully and thoroughly. In it the reader will find important studies of constructions whose acquisition has heretofore been explored largely in English. The book is an exemplary piece of work, the kind that the field of language acquisition urgently needs many more of. Its focus is on the development of morphological and syntactic aspects of argument structure in Tarramiut, a subdialect of lnuktitut spoken in Arctic Quebec; in particular, three argument structure-changing operations are studied in detail: passive, causative, and noun incorporation. The data are from longitudinal spontaneous speech samples of four Inuit children, aged 2;0 through 3;6, collected by Allen in the community of Quaqtaq, where the influence of French and English is relatively minor and Inuit is the language of everyday. While the author wisely presents this as first and foremost a descriptive study, the discussion of children's productions is framed in the analyses of Principles and Parameters syntax pre-Minimalism (e.g., Chomsky and Lasnik 1993), and makes particular use of Baker's (1988) theory of incorporation. There is also considerable invocation of a wide range of theories of language acquisition, with Allen remaining fairly agnostic among them, except as her own data bear on specific claims that they make. The body of the book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides the motivations for the study, the theoretical backdrop for (morpho)syntax and acquisition, a description of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, and some needed descriptive background on the structure of lnuktitut. Chapter 2 includes a description of where and how the data were collected and transcribed, the situations in which the children were living, and how certain quantitative measures of the children's speech were calculated. (The children's interactions were videotaped; the transcribed data constituted roughly two hours per month for nine months per child. Of these nine sessions, three equally-spaced ones were coded and analyzed in detail for each child, although child utterances from other transcripts are mentioned sporadically throughout the book when relevant.) The best part of this chapter relates to the central question of when a child can be said to be using a grammatical construction productively, as opposed to using particular forms as unanalyzed units. Allen gives a lucid characterization of seven ways in which this productivity can be argued for: "use of innovative forms, use of incorrect allomorphs, use of the morpheme in question in a variety of contrasting environments, presence of self-correction, alternation between use and incorrect lack of use of the morpheme, alternation between use of a structure involving an argument structure-changing operation and a basic underived structure, and demonstration of control of scope effects involving the relevant morpheme" (p. 191).