Chapter 18Copula, existence, and possession clauses
The copula ne, the existential verbs an and okay, locational clauses, and existential possession.
Two small verbs carry much of the weight of Sakhalin Ainu syntax: the copula ne, which builds equative and ascriptive clauses, and the existential an with its plural partner okay, which build existence, location, and — together with koro ‘have’ — possession clauses. Both also live a second life inside grammar: ne in the future construction kusu ne and in the topic particle neampe, an in aspectual periphrases and in the evidential constructions. This chapter describes the clause types; the grammaticalized uses are treated in Chapter 15 and Chapter 16.
18.1 Copular clauses
An equative clause has the syntax of a transitive clause: the copular object — the predicate nominal — stands immediately before ne and is never case-marked, an overt subject precedes it, and a non-third-person subject is indexed on the copula itself with the transitive subject prefixes (Dal Corso 2025b: 48). In the narrative corpus the copula typically appears with a long vowel, nee, and is followed by the reportative manu (Chapter 16); on vowel length see Chapter 4.
A first- or second-person subject is indexed on the copula itself, as the conversational record makes plain; the predicate nominal may identify the referent by name (an identificational clause) or assign it to a class (a classificatory one), a contrast Murasaki's conversation course draws in a single exchange:
‘I am Tarō.’
Murasaki 2025: lesson 2; West Sakhalin
The overt 1SG prefix ku= on the copula, in an identificational clause naming the referent.
‘I am a Wajin woman.’ (lit. ‘as for me, I am a Wajin woman’)
Murasaki 2025: lesson 3; West Sakhalin
The same speaker has just identified herself by name (kuani neyke Kiyoko ku=nee ‘I am Kiyoko’); here the predicate nominal siisam mahtekuh assigns her to a class. neyke is the conditional-based topic ‘as for’ (Chapter 23).
The predicate nominal may itself be a noun phrase of any internal complexity, including one headed by a relative clause (Chapter 21):
Negation of the copula differs by coast: East-coast ham=ne, West-coast hannehka as a suppletive negative copula (§17.3).
18.2 Existential clauses
Existence is predicated with the suppletive pair an ‘exist’ (singular) and okay (plural) — the same verbs that underlie the aspectual periphrases of Chapter 15. Their suppletion is part of the wider system of verbal number described in Chapter 12; the plural stem may carry the plural suffix -hci as well. A bare existential clause with an indefinite noun phrase is the standard way of introducing a new referent, and the formula N sineh an manu ‘there was one N’ opens tale after tale in the Asai Take corpus (Chapter 24):
‘There was an old woman, it is said.’
Murasaki 2001: text 1; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
The negative counterpart is the lexical negative existential isam, never a negated an (§17.4).
18.3 Location
A locative existential adds a place expression — a locative-marked noun or a relational noun phrase (Chapter 11) — before the existential verb. With a definite subject the same frame reads as a locational statement, ‘X is in/at Y’:
Existential and locational clauses freely modify nouns, since any clause may stand before a head noun (Chapter 21); the frame cise ohta an N ‘the N who was in the house’ is among the most common relative patterns in the narrative corpus:
18.4 Possession clauses
Predicative possession uses the transitive verb koro ‘have’, whose possessor is the A argument and possessee the O argument. With kin and offspring the verb also covers ‘get, come to have’:
The same verb supplies an adnominal possessive construction: a relative clause on koro, as in Sentoku Tarōji's salutation an=koro nispa ‘my master’, literally ‘the master whom we have’ ((Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1)), beside the morphological possessive of Chapter 7. Negative possession is expressed by the lexical negatives sak ‘not have’ or, with the possessee as subject, isam ‘not exist’ (§17.4; (Dal Corso 2025b: 40)).
18.6 Copula and existential inside the inferentials
The evidential constructions of Chapter 16 end in one of this chapter's two verbs: a possessed perception noun, preceded by its clausal possessor, is anchored either by an or by the copula. The two anchors are not interchangeable. The first restriction is lexical: only ruwehe ‘its trace’ admits both (ruwehe an ~ ruwehe ne(e)), while sirihi, humihi and hawehe take the existential only (Dal Corso 2018: 72).
Where both anchors are available, the choice tracks the speaker's viewpoint on the inferred event. We analyse existential an as the external construal: the situation is reconstructed from outside, as a closed whole read off its trace, and the form carries a mirative shading of the speaker's own prior unawareness. The copula construes the situation from inside, as content the speaker has processed and made her own. The distributional signature of the split is person: the copular tokens in Dal Corso's corpus overwhelmingly have a first- or second-person participant inside the scope of the inference, while the existential resists speech-act participants there (Dal Corso 2018: §7.3.5). One infers with the copula about events one was part of; startled inference about wholly external events selects the existential. The opposition thus redeploys the internal/imperfective versus external/perfective contrast of viewpoint aspect, applied not to a lexical verb but to the speaker's stance on an inferred proposition. Its temporal corollary — the copula forces a present reading, the existential leaves telicity to decide between past and present — is set out in §16.5.
The alternation is also dialect-diagnostic. ruwehe ne(e) is confined to the east coast, which never developed the visual sirihi an; the west coast has sirihi an and lacks the copular form (Dal Corso 2018: 72, §7.3.4). The two are in near-complementary distribution across the dialect boundary and do comparable work: each coast opposes a processed, speaker-internal inference to a raw external one, but encodes the processed pole with the copula in the East and with a dedicated perception noun in the West.
Finally, the two verbs can co-occur in one evidential predicate, each in its own slot. In the sentence below the copula equates a nominalized clause with the evidential noun, and the existential then anchors the whole as a present state — stacking, not redundancy: