Agency and argument realization in early child Inuktitut

Argument realization, and particularly argument omission, is a subject that has been widely studied in the field of child language research, and several different theories have been put forth to explain this phenomenon. In this study, seman-tic agency is proposed as a contributing factor. To test this, corpus data of four children acquiring Inuktitut were coded for agency on the grammatical subjects produced by the children. Statistical analyses were performed to assess the rela-tionship between subject argument form and agency. A qualitative analysis of the verb semantics associated with non-agent subjects was also performed. While the analyses yielded some statistically significant results, no clear relationship between these factors could be identified. The qualitative analysis, on the other hand, did appear to reveal a weak trend in terms of a relationship between verb seman-tics and argument realization. The findings are discussed in terms of the broader aspects of the development of agency, transitivity, and ergativity. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Barbora Skarabela and Mits Ota for helpful comments and inspiring conversations during this year. Secondly, thanks to fellow PPLS postgraduates for providing friendship, advice, and banter during our stay here in Edinburgh. Also to Lynsey, Toni, and Katie— who made everything go smoothly, even when it seemed impossible. Lastly, thanks go to my parents. Your help and support has been of great importance to me during my education