Despite their resemblance to subject relative clauses, pseudo-relatives are commonly analyzed as a nominal subject and CP predicate of a small clause, with the ‘gap' inside the CP being a null PRO controlled by the subject (e.g. Cinque 1992, Rafel 2000, Moulton & Grillo 2015). Previous work on pseudo-relatives has almost entirely been restricted to European languages (e.g. Romance, Slavic, and Greek), and has primarily concentrated on their usage as complements of perception verbs. Based on original fieldwork on (Eastern Canadian) Inuktitut, this talk argues for a pseudo-relative analysis of an understudied existential construction in Inuit, in which a clause (rather than a noun) is morphologically incorporated into an existential verb, -qaq ‘have'. I propose that ‘have' syntactically embeds a small clause, whose predicate is the incorporated control CP and whose subject is the nominal pivot of the existential. This analysis is motivated by strong structural parallels with pseudo-relatives in other languages, and is shaped by well-established morphosyntactic properties specific to Inuit. If correct, the finding that pseudo-relatives exist in Inuit is notable, as it shows that they are not solely a European phenomenon. Moreover, given Inuit’s polysynthetic nature, its sentence-level syntax is not straightforward to ascertain; however, the analysis developed here shows that Inuit clause structure is composed of cross-linguistically familiar pieces.
