Chapter 24Information structure

24.1 Topic marking: neampe and anahne

The topic particle of Sakhalin Ainu is neampe ‘as for’ (east-coast sources neanpe), placed after the phrase it marks. Chiri lists it as the Sakhalin equivalent of Hokkaidō anak, anakne and of Japanese は (Chiri 1942: §127), and Dal Corso calls it simply the topic marker (Dal Corso 2024: 61). Formally it is the anaphoric pronoun neampe ‘that thing’ — ne-an-pe ‘thing being that’ (Chapter 9) — frozen into a particle, and the pronominal and particle uses still shade into one another. It is by far the commonest information-structure word of the corpus: 917 tokens in the Asai Take tales by our count, against 312 of ka and 58 of kayki.

With a noun phrase host, neampe typically marks a contrastive or switched topic rather than mere givenness. Subjects that simply continue the current topic go unmarked; neampe appears where one referent is picked out against another, as when sisters divide their chores or pair off with husbands in sequence — inoskun monimahpo neampe inoskun horokewpo sam ‘the middle girl married the middle man’, and so on down the list (Murasaki (2001) text 18). We analyse this as the particle's core function in the west-coast narrative corpus.

The same particle serves the east coast. In Yamabe Yasunosuke's (山辺安之助) autobiography neanpe marks non-subject topics — urayki neanpe ham utara ki kun-pe ne ‘war is a thing one must not make’, with the object topicalised and the subject unmarked (Sakaguchi 2020a: 190–191) — and it may be doubled over a contrastive list:

Beside it the east coast keeps anahne ‘as for’, the formal match of Hokkaidō anakne. Piłsudski glosses it ‘as regards’ in his interlinear English (Piłsudski 1912: 23); in his texts it favours scene-setting adverbs — tani anahne ‘now, for its part’ is a recurrent narrative re-launcher (Chapter 9, example (6) there; Sakaguchi (2020a: 194)). The two markers stack in one sentence:

In the west-coast corpus anahne is absent: Asai Take's anah (17 tokens, all of them) is the conditional converb ‘if, when’ (Murasaki (2025: 33); Chapter 23; example (19) below), and its combination anahkayki with the focus particle kayki yields concessive ‘even if, although’. We take the division of labour to be dialectal: the east coast retains the inherited topic particle anahne alongside innovating neanpe, while the west coast has generalised neampe and reserves bare anah for the conditional.

Outside the folktales, the expository prose of the Sentoku letters shows the unmarked side of the same system: a topical subject that continues or re-activates an already salient referent is simply placed first, with no particle. The Ainu community is one such standing topic of the third letter, and the clause reporting its response to official pressure fronts it bare:

24.2 Focus particles

The additive and restrictive particles follow the phrase they scope over, after any postposition. Chiri's inventory for this class gives ka ‘also’, kaiki ‘also’, Sakhalin na ‘also’, patek ‘only’ and poka ‘at least’ (Chiri 1942: §125); Furukawa's Rayciska grammar lists ka, naa ‘also’ and pateh ‘only’ as the living members of the class (Furukawa 1967: 106).

ka ‘also, even’ is the general additive ‘also, too’, and under negation a scalar ‘(not) even’, as in (2) above and in the negative indefinites neh ka ‘nothing at all’, hemata ka ‘something/ anything’ built on interrogatives (Chapter 9; Chapter 17). It attaches to nouns, adverbs and converb clauses alike:

kayki ‘even, also’ is the emphatic counterpart, ‘even, indeed also’. The two alternate in the same frame within one tale: in text 28 a succession of slighted animals each complain taah ka ku-e-ocis ‘this too I resent’, but at the climax the herring-girls say:

kayki also welds onto subordinators — anahkayki ‘even if’, (ne)yahkayki ‘although’ (Chapter 23) — and onto neewa ‘and’ in neewa kayki ‘but, and yet’. The plain additive of the east-coast letters is na ‘also’, which Chiri records as a specifically Sakhalin particle ‘also’ (Chiri 1942: §125); Sentoku Tarōji uses it again and again where Asai Take has naa (258 tokens, including the correlative muysankeh ne naa sahka ne naa ‘both into brooms and into chopsticks’, text 5):

The restrictive particle is pateh ‘only’, underlyingly patek with the regular debuccalization of the final stop; the east-coast texts show pate ~ pateki with the final consonant lost or supported by a vowel (Dal Corso 2024: 61), (Chiri 1942: §125).

Two of Chiri's particles need comment. poka ‘at least, even’ carries no Sakhalin tag in his list, and in our Sakhalin corpus every poka is the locative postposition ‘over, along’ (rih poka ahkas cikah ‘the birds that walk the sky’; Chapter 11): we conclude that the scalar particle is a Hokkaidō item whose work falls in Sakhalin to kayki and ka. Finally, the pure emphasis particles asi(n) and es ~ eski belong to the literary register of the east-coast tales; Piłsudski judged es "an expletive, unmeaning…, used, it seems, only to give animation to the tale" (Piłsudski 1912: 167), and Chiri retained them as Sakhalin emphasis particles (Chiri 1942: §127).

24.3 Word-order variation

The pragmatically neutral clause is verb-final, with topical material first (Chapter 19); interrogatives stand in situ (Chapter 9), so there is no dedicated preverbal focus slot to fill by movement. The living word-order resource of the spoken narrative is instead the postverbal afterthought: a constituent added after the sentence-final verb (usually after the reportative manu, Chapter 16) to clarify a referent the speaker has left underspecified. In the Asai Take corpus we count 81 such right-dislocations after manu alone, ranging from full noun phrases to place adverbs; the commonest is specification of the subject of a verb of saying.

We analyse these as true afterthoughts rather than a focus position: the dislocated phrase is always discourse-old or inferable, never the answer to a question, and the clause is already complete without it. The same looseness lets a frame adverbial trail the verb (sine cih yan manu, atuy kaawa ‘a boat came ashore — from the sea’, text 28). Fronting, by contrast, is the normal home of neampe-marked topics (§24.1), which precede everything else in their clause.

24.4 Presentational constructions

New referents enter the discourse through an existential presentation: the numeral sine ‘one, a certain’ plus noun plus an ‘exist.SG’ (or okay ‘exist.PL’; Chapter 18). Chiri observed that sine here does the work of an indefinite article and the anaphoric demonstratives that of the definite — his model sequence is sine aynu an. ne aynu ene itaki ‘a man was. that man spoke thus’ (Chiri 1942: §100, §103). Forty of the fifty-four tales in the Asai Take corpus open with exactly this formula, usually anchored to the stock village name Sannupis:

A variant places the numeral after the noun in its nominalized form sineh (Chapter 10): ahci sineh an manu ‘there was an old woman’ (text 1), and example (14) above. Inside a running narrative the presentation is typically framed by a -hi neampe clause topic, as in (6): the protagonist's movement sets the scene, the existential introduces the new participant, and the anaphorics neya and nean ‘the aforementioned’ then track it for the rest of the tale (Chapter 9).

24.5 Discourse particles in dialogue

Quoted dialogue and the conversational record show a compact system of sentence-final particles. Directives are graded by three request particles, in descending politeness kanne, waa, koh (Murasaki 2025: 38): kanne makes a courteous request (hanka cis kanne ‘don't cry, dear’, text 3), waa a plain command, and koh — Furukawa's kah ‘rough command, used to one's own children’ (Furukawa 1967: 107) — a curt one (tah ampa koh! ‘take this!’). Plural addressees take the imperative suffix -yan, combinable with kanne:

The same wa closes requests in the letters — hanka e=ranpotara wa ‘do not worry’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 3) — so the particle belonged to both coasts and to written as well as spoken usage. Invitations have polite anaa ‘let us…’ and familiar roo (keh, paye-an roo ‘come on, let's go!’); assertions directed at the hearer take naa ‘you'll see’ and wanaa ‘see, just as I said’; and an indignant refusal ends in nanko (Furukawa 1967: 107–108):

The remaining final particle, hVV (hii, hee…, its vowel copied from the verb), strengthens statements and questions alike, the two distinguished only by intonation (Murasaki (2025: 19); Chapter 9); Chiri's bare question particle he belongs to the same interjectional class (Chiri 1942: §129). Dialogue turns themselves are managed by interjections, above all iineahsuy ‘hey, say’, which opens an appeal to the hearer many times over in the Asai Take corpus — example (2) — and shades from ‘hey!’ into ‘now listen, the fact is…’. Together with the topic chains of §24.1 and the presentational formula of §24.4, these little words are what give the spoken Sakhalin sentence its characteristic shape: frame first, verb last, and the speaker's stance hung on the end.