Tlingit's Verbs & Consequences for Language Documentation & Learning

Presented by James Crippen.

Tlingit is a First Nations language of Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon. Traditional linguistic research has presented Tlingit’s verbs as large strings of interwoven morphology; however, this approach is complex, daunting, and difficult to internalize.

Crippen’s work counters this approach, arguing that Tlingit’s verbs are more like whole sentences, hence they can be straightforwardly analyzed with conventional syntactic theory.