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Much recent literature has focused on whether the verbal agreement morphology cross-referencing objects is true φ-agreement or clitic doubling. I address this question on the basis of comparative data from related Inuit languages, Inuktitut and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), and argue that both possibilities are attested in Inuit. Evidence for this claim comes from diverging syntactic and semantic properties of the object DPs encoded by this cross-referencing morphology. I demonstrate that object DPs in Inuktitut display various properties mirroring the behavior of clitic-doubled objects crosslinguistically, while their counterparts in Kalaallisut display none of these properties, indicating genuine φ-agreement rather than clitic doubling. Crucially, this distinction cannot be detected morphologically, as the relevant cross-referencing morphemes are uniform across Inuit. Therefore, this article cautions against the reliability of canonical morphological diagnostics for (agreement) affixes vs. clitics. 

A long-standing issue in the analysis of noun incorporation (NI) concerns whether the noun-verb complex is derived by syntactic movement of the object or postsyntactic merger of the verb and an in situ object. The same question pervades the literature on word formation and affixation more generally. This paper investigates these questions from the point of view of Inuktitut, an Inuit language of Northern Canada, and argues that both NI and polysynthetic word formation in Inuit are postsyntactic phenomena, derived by successive m-merger between adjacent elements along the clausal spine. I argue that incorporated nominals in Inuktitut are syntactically active, in that they remain accessible for case, agreement, and even phrasal movement operations, despite being overtly realized within the verb complex. These patterns follow straightforwardly from interactions between postsyntactic m-merger and general conditions on copy spell-out. M-merger of a nominal copy in a movement chain prevents that copy from being deleted, in accordance to morphological well-formedness conditions on word formation.