Chapter 19The simple clause and word order

19.1 Arguments and their omission

Person marking makes independent pronouns redundant. Furukawa states the distribution plainly: kuani ‘I’, eani ‘you’, anoka ‘we’, ecioka ‘you (pl)’ are used only when the speaker points to the referent itself, while in ordinary clauses the affixes alone carry the relations Furukawa (1967: 102–103) (Chapter 9). Third persons are unmarked on the verb, so a third-person argument that is not recoverable from context is the one that appears as an overt noun phrase:

Connected narrative pushes the same economy further. In the Asai Take corpus, runs of clauses with no overt noun phrase at all are the norm once protagonists are established, with reference managed by the verbal morphology, by the anaphoric demonstrative neya when needed, and by the discourse conventions described in Chapter 24. Overt noun phrases cluster at episode boundaries, where participants enter or change; this distribution is our generalisation over the corpus, and it matches Furukawa's elicited judgements.

19.2 Constituent order

The pragmatically neutral orders are subject–verb and agent–object–verb; obliques and adverbs precede the verb, and nothing follows it except the grammatical tail — auxiliaries, evidentials, and final particles (Furukawa (1967: 102); (Dal Corso 2025b: 39)). Example (2) above shows the full A–O–V layout with a ditransitive verb. A clause with a chained posture predicate illustrates the same head-final profile:

Departures from verb-finality in the spoken corpus are afterthoughts: a noun phrase identifying a referent is added after the predicate (and after the reportative manu), with the prosody of a separate tail. We analyse these as right-dislocation rather than basic order; they typically resolve the reference of a quoted speaker:

19.3 The noun phrase

Within the noun phrase the order is fixed: demonstrative, numeral, modifying clause, head noun, plural word — Furukawa's rule NP → (Det_d) (Det_n) (clause) N (plural) (Furukawa 1967: 102). Modifying ‘adjectives’ are clauses (Chapter 6; Chapter 21), and the plural words uta(h) (Chapter 8), oy, and ikiri close the phrase. The possessive morphology wraps around the whole phrase, not just the head noun: Furukawa records e-kurasno seta-ha ‘your black dog’ and, with a numeral,

19.4 Questions

Sakhalin Ainu marks polar questions with intonation and final particles, never with word-order change. The striking fact, recorded by Furukawa for Rayciska, is that the interrogative contour is FALLING while declaratives end high: the same string tara aynu omanihi is ‘that person went’ with rising pitch and ‘did that person go?’ with falling pitch (Furukawa 1967: 109). Final particles split by the same contour — wa with rising pitch commands, with falling pitch questions (Furukawa 1967: 105):

The default polar particle of the modern conversational record is hee, which closes copular and verbal questions alike; it is the interrogative particle of Murasaki's Enciw course (Chapter 9), and the rest of this grammar relies on it. A copular polar question:

Sentoku Tarōji's letters attest the particle ya in the same function, stacked after hetane in temana an okay e=kihi hetane ya ‘how are you faring?’ (Chapter 26). Content questions leave the interrogative word in its clause-internal position (Chapter 9 for the inventory); no fronting is attested in the corpus:

19.5 Commands and invitations

The imperative is the bare verb, normally supported by a final particle scaled to politeness: kanne for polite requests, wa for plain commands, kah for brusque ones used with intimates (Furukawa 1967: 105–108). The prohibitive counterpart with hanka is described in §17.5.

Hortatives use the indefinite-person suffix -an on the plural verb stem, with the invitation particles anaa (polite) or roo (familiar) (Furukawa 1967: 108) (Chapter 15):

19.6 The final-particle slot

Furukawa treats the sentence-final particle as an obligatory constituent of the clause, realised as zero (with its intonation) when no overt particle occurs (Furukawa 1967: 105). Her Rayciska inventory, the fullest we have for any Sakhalin variety, is worth setting out; the modal particles overlap with the system described in Chapter 15 and the discourse particles with Chapter 24.

Negative indefinite clauses — built with ne(e) … ka plus a negative predicate — round out the picture of simple-clause types (Chapter 17):