Ergative to accusative

This paper examines the case of different dialects of Inuktitut which appear to vary in their distribution and function of the antipassive construction. It is hypothesized that a difference in grammatical restrictions on this construction will coincide with a quantitative difference in occurrence, i.e. some dialects have moved further along the continuum toward a nominative-accusative typology. However, it is shown that counting the number of tokens of the case marker in question does not show any statistical significance, due to the fact that this case marker has functions independent of object marking and that these functions appear to vary in inverse proportion to the degree to which it is used as an accusative marker.