Chapter 23Clause linking

23.1 Sequential linkage: wa, teh, and the temporal gap

The two general ‘and’ linkers divide the territory by event structure, and Furukawa's elicitation captured the line between them. wa joins actions with no gap, so that the two fuse into a single event; teh sequences distinct actions with a perceptible interval between them; the narrative-succession linkers of §23.2 then push the second event into a new episode altogether. Her consultant accepted both of the following but rejected *ku-koro wa ku-eh, where buying and coming are separate events (Furukawa 1967: 110–111):

Both linkers feed grammaticalization: teh an is the stative periphrasis and wa isam the conclusive (Chapter 15; §17.4). In Asai Take's narration teh is the default sequencer, often several to a sentence; the Sentoku letters use wa more freely. In nukara konte wa ‘please read it’ (Letter 1), though, the wa is the request-softening final particle that follows the benefactive, not a sequencer (Chapter 26).

The interval that teh asserts can be made explicit by a following orowa ‘after that’ — transparently the possessed relational noun oro ‘place (of it)’ plus the ablative wa ‘from’ (Chapter 11), so literally ‘from there’. The reinforced sequence teh orowa ‘and after that’ keeps the chain open for further links, here a purpose clause in kusu before the single finite close:

23.2 Narrative succession: (h)ike and (h)ine

At the wide end of the temporal-gap scale stand the narrative-succession linkers. ike ‘and (so), when’ — historically the nominalizer -(h)ike ‘the one that…’ reanalysed as a linker — is the Sakhalin workhorse: Chiri notes the h- doublet and states that Sakhalin (h)ike serves ‘in the same sense as wa, hine, tek’, in which use it is best regarded as a conjunctive particle outright (Chiri 1942: §51, §61). In narrative it typically chains a backgrounded presentational clause onto the event line:

Its partner hine ~ ine, which Chiri derives from a-ine, is the great narrative converb of Hokkaidō but thin in the Sakhalin texts, where ike — and its reportative fusion manuyke (§23.6) — does the corresponding work; hine survives most clearly in the stative periphrasis hine an that Chiri lists beside teh an (Chapter 15). The comparative picture runs through teh itself: in Saru the cognate tek narrowed into an auxiliary ‘do for a moment’, leaving sequence to wa and hine, while Sakhalin teh keeps the older linking value (Bugaeva 2022). Chiri's catalogue further records a counter-expectational a(h)i ~ a(h)ike ‘…when (unexpectedly), …but’ built on the same formative (Chiri 1942: §39); the corpus does not let us draw its line against plain ike, a point taken up in §23.7.

23.3 Temporal and durative linkers

yayne marks a prolonged event overtaken by what follows — ‘while doing, until eventually’:

The same family supplies the sentence-initial (an)ayne ‘in time, meanwhile’ of §23.6. kanne links a simultaneous backgrounded action, ‘while’ — kuwa koro kanne ahkas ‘walks holding a stick’ (§19.2) — beside its final-particle use in requests (§19.6). Posterior ‘after’ is built on the nominal okaaketa ‘in the aftermath of’, as in macihi isan teh okaaketa ‘after his wife had gone out’ (§17.4); anteriority needs no dedicated marker beyond teh.

23.4 Causal and purposive linkage

kusu covers cause and purpose, the reading resolved by the relation between the clauses; with the copula it builds the intentional future kusu ne and with iki the assertive future (Chapter 15). Nominal cause is carried by renkayne ‘owing to’, which also governs clauses, as in Sentoku's tani nuca isan renkayne ‘now that the Russians are gone’ (§17.4). Negative purpose uses kuni no (§22.2). A single sentence of the Dobrotvorsky-era texts stacks causal ne kusu with a concessive:

23.5 Conditionals and concessives

The conditional linkers are anah(ka) and cik(in) ~ ciki; both follow the bare protasis verb. anah shades from ‘if’ into topic marking, a polysemy taken up in Chapter 24:

The East-coast texts add the heavier protasis marker kusu neyke, which interacts with negation in the hannah kusu conditional construction (§17.5; (Dal Corso 2025b: 55–56)). The concessive is yahka ‘although, even if’, as in (6) and Furukawa's ekasre seeseh yahka wen ‘even too much warmth is bad’ (Furukawa 1967: 111).

23.6 Narrative chaining

Connected narrative organizes these links into a recognizable rhythm. Clauses chain with teh and ike ‘and, when’ up to a finite verb capped by the reportative (Chapter 16); the next sentence then re-opens by repeating the last verb of the previous one — tail-head linkage, ubiquitous in Asai Take's telling:

The fusion of the reportative with ike yields the narrative linker manuyke ‘…, it is said, and’, which keeps a chain running across what is formally a sentence boundary:

Above the clause, a closed set of sentence-initial connectives — built from the copula, the existential, and orowa ‘from there, then’ — manages the larger discourse: neeteh and nahteh ‘and then’, orowa(no) ‘after that’, anayne ‘meanwhile, in time’, neyke ‘and so’. They open the majority of sentences in the Asai Take corpus, often doubled (neeteh orowa tani…); this inventory and its layering are our generalisation from the corpus. The same forms carry the topic-resumption work described in Chapter 24.

23.7 Furukawa's forty: reconstructing the inventory

Furukawa reports having identified some forty conjunctive forms in Rayciska but published worked examples of only four — wa, teh, yayne, yahka (Furukawa 1967: 108–111). The rest are not lost to description. Chiri's catalogue of conjunctive particles — his third particle class, drawn up pan-dialectally with the Sakhalin uses flagged (Chiri 1942: §120–121) — contains most of them, and reading that catalogue against the West- and East-coast texts recovers the bulk of the inventory. The table sorts the result by evidential footing: which linkers Furukawa exemplified, which the corpus confirms independently, and which still rest on Chiri's authority alone.

On this reading Furukawa's ‘forty’ are no mystery: essentially the union of the linkers of this chapter with Chiri's catalogue, swelled by transparent reinforcements (teh orowa, nahteh orowa) and the copula-built connectives of §23.6. What remains genuinely open is the fine discrimination among near-synonyms — a(h)i against a(h)ike, kane against koh — in West-coast speech, which only elicitation could have settled. Two members of the catalogue belong to complementation rather than linking: the irrealis kunak ~ kuni (§22.2), and the quotative frame in nah, inside which a quoted speaker refers to him- or herself with the indefinite an- rather than a first-person form — the quoted-speaker strategy described with quotation in §22.3.