Chapter 7Nouns and possession

7.1 Conceptual and possessed form

Chiri introduces the opposition with sik ‘eye’ (Chiri's morphophonemic citation; the West-coast isolation form is sis by coda neutralisation, Chapter 4): the conceptual form names the bare concept, while the possessed form anchors the referent to a possessor, third person being zero-marked Chiri (1942: §70).

7.2 The syntax of possession

Adnominal possession is head-marking and strictly head-final: the possessor NP stands before the possessed-form head, with no linking element — the type aynu cise-he ‘the man's house’. Pronominal possessor phrases are usually omitted, since the prefix identifies them (Bugaeva 2016: 104).

With no overt possessor and no prefix, the possessed form is third-person by default and is read from context, here ‘her husband’:

7.3 Inalienable possession

Body parts, kin terms and part–whole nouns are the core of the possessive system: in connected speech they occur overwhelmingly in the possessed form, and a bare conceptual sapa or ona is largely confined to compounds, vocatives and kind-readings of the type in (4) Chiri (1942: §76), (Bugaeva 2022: ch. 9, §4.2). The corpus matches this distribution: hands, legs, heads, eyes, beaks, names, voices, fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, husbands and children appear as tek-ihi, kema-ha, sapa-ha, siki-hi, etu-wehe, ree-he, maci-hi, hoku-hu, poo-ho in example after example above. At the other pole, nouns for natural phenomena — cuh ‘sun’, ahto ‘rain’, atuy ‘sea’, wahka ‘water’ — normally stay conceptual, there being no possessor to anchor; Chiri notes that even these can be coerced into a possessed form when a god speaks of an-kanto-ho ‘our own sky’ (Chiri 1942: §76), and Murasaki's consultants allowed ku-atuy-ehe ‘my sea, the sea where I live’ (Bugaeva 2022: introduction). Inalienability is thus a strong statistical norm rather than a formal class boundary.

7.4 Alienable possession and the koro strategy

Here Sakhalin Ainu departs sharply from Hokkaidō. In Hokkaidō the suffixal possessed form is restricted to inalienables, and alienable possession requires the relative-clause periphrasis with koro ‘have’: a-kor mosir ‘our land, lit. the land we have’. In Sakhalin the suffixal construction has been generalized to nouns of all classes — houses (6), garments (7), boats (9), axes (5), villages and lands (an-mosir-ihi ‘our land’, (Murasaki 1979: 5)) — so that both inalienable and alienable relations are head-marked (Bugaeva 2016: 105); for the place of this appositive possessor-plus-possessed pattern within Ainu and the wider Pacific see (Bugaeva 2021). Even animate property is possessed suffixally: the ogre's hunting dog is its seta-ha (Murasaki 2001: text 35), an example Tangiku singles out as characteristically Sakhalin (Bugaeva 2022: ch. 9, §4.2).

The koro periphrasis nonetheless survives beside the suffixal pattern. Chiri describes it for possessees with personhood: an-koro mah ‘my wife’, nispa koro mah ‘the chief's wife’ (Chiri 1942: §76). The Sentoku letters use it for social relations and places, an=koro nispa ‘my dear sir’, e=koro kotan ‘your village’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1), and in the Asai corpus it alternates with the suffixal form within a single sentence:

Where both strategies are available the difference is one of construal. Murasaki's consultant contrasted ku-kotan-uhu ‘my village’, said while in it, with ku-koro kotan, said of one's own village from elsewhere — and put ku-koro kotan in the mouth of a god (Murasaki 1979: 83–84), (Bugaeva 2022: ch. 9, §4.2). We read the suffixal form as marking a referent anchored to its possessor in the speech situation, and koro as predicating ownership or control; the corpus alternations in (14) and in the letters are consistent with this division.

7.5 Locative nouns

Locative (relational) nouns — onnayke ‘inside’, kaske ‘top’, empoke ‘underside’, sanke ‘vicinity’, okaake ‘place behind, aftermath’, etoko ‘place ahead’, uturuke ‘interval’, soyke ‘outside’ — form a noun subclass with their own syntax: they follow an NP directly (cise onnayke ‘the inside of the house’), and only they combine with the simple locative postpositions ta, wa, ene Chiri (1942: §79), (Bugaeva 2022: ch. 9, §5.1). Their case syntax belongs to Chapter 11; here we note only how they participate in the possessive opposition. Before a locative postposition the conceptual form appears, as in (15); as argument of an ordinary verb the possessed form is required, as in (16) and (17) (Bugaeva 2022: ch. 9, §5.4).

When a locative noun takes a personal possessor it selects the object prefixes, not the possessor set used by common nouns: en-ka ‘above me’ (Chiri 1942: §79), i-osmak-e ‘behind me’ in the narrative of Yamabe Yasunosuke 山辺安之助 (Sakaguchi 2024: 20). This object-like marking aligns the landmark argument of a locative noun with the object of a transitive verb, and we take it as the synchronic trace of their verb-like relationality.

7.6 Derived nominals

Nouns are derived from verbs chiefly with the formal nouns pe ‘thing, one’ / -p (poro-p ‘a big one’), hi ‘place, time, fact’, kur ‘person’ and usi ‘place’ (Chiri 1942: §§60–63); their syntax is treated with nominalization in Chapter 20. The nominaliser -p is given in Chiri's morphophonemic citation; in West-coast isolation it undergoes the regular coda-obstruent neutralisation of Chapter 4, as with sik ~ sis earlier in this chapter. The formal noun kur likewise appears in its morphophonemic shape, but its final r follows the separate coda-r alternation (West-coast r → h or an echo vowel, varying word by word) rather than the obstruent rule (Chapter 4). Distinctively Sakhalin is the extension of the possessive suffix itself to verbs: a clause may be nominalized by -hV on its predicate, as in sitayki-hi neampe ‘when (she) struck it’ in (2), e=ki-hi ‘how you are faring’ in the Sentoku letters (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1), or main-clause an-koro-ho ‘I have (a grandchild)’ noted already by Chiri (Chiri 1942: §77). Bugaeva analyses these V-POSS forms as genuine nominalizations and as the innovation that gave Sakhalin Ainu its distinctive non-finite clause types (Bugaeva 2016: 105–110). That they are nominal in syntax and not merely in shape is shown by their argument privileges: a V-POSS clause can stand as the subject of an evaluative or veridicality predicate, as in (18), where the nominalized clause is what is judged untrue.

The V-POSS construction and its uses return in Chapter 20 and Chapter 16.