Chapter 11Postpositions and relational nouns

11.1 The case-particle system

Table 1 surveys the system. The particles follow the noun phrase directly; the noun keeps its conceptual or possessed form as the sense requires, and plural -hcin precedes the particle (tek-ihi-cin ohta ‘in his hands’, (Piłsudski 1912: 70); (Chiri 1942: §67)). Most of the particles also have an independent, anaphoric use without a host noun — ohta ‘there’, orowa ‘then, after that’ (944 corpus tokens, mostly as a narrative connective), turano ‘at the same time’ — a point Chiri makes for each entry Chiri (1942: §123).

Two members of the Hokkaidō system are conspicuously restructured here. The allative is onne, a Sakhalin form Chiri flags as such (Hokkaidō uses un and orun); and the plain ablative is wa with its expansions oro wa > orowa and, in Sakhalin only, bare oro Chiri (1942: §123(129), (135), (157)). The attributive un survives in place-name epithets of the type Sannupis-un re horokewpo ‘the three young men of Sannupista’ (Murasaki 2001: text 51).

11.2 Locative and dative ohta, ta

ohta is the workhorse of the system — over five hundred tokens in the Asai corpus alone. Historically it is the relational noun oro ‘place’ plus the locative particle ta (or-ta), and Chiri notes that the fusion had gone so far that ohta, orun, orowa behave as simple particles Chiri (1942: §79). In the East-coast letters it is spelled okta, with the cluster unlenited (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1); see Chapter 5 on the h ~ k alternation. It marks both static location (1) and the goal of motion (2), the latter overlapping with onne:

Temporal noun phrases take the same particle: sihtoono ohta ‘at midday’ (Murasaki 2001: text 46), sine cup okta ‘in one month’, nuca kotan koro okta ‘when the Russians held the country’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1).

The bare particle ta is no longer free with ordinary nouns: in the corpus it appears fused with place roots and relational nouns — teeta ‘here’, taata ‘there’, kotanta ‘in the village’, ciseta ‘at the house’ (17 tokens), and the kasketa-type forms of §11.8 — while full noun phrases are hosted by ohta. This distribution, which we draw from the corpus, matches Murasaki's teaching rule: place names and common nouns take ohta, locative nouns take -ta (Murasaki 2025: 17); Chiri's entry for ta likewise has it on roots and formal nouns (Chiri 1942: §123(150)).

A Sakhalin innovation extends ohta beyond location: Chiri documents, chiefly from Taraytomari, an overt object-marking use with effected objects and action nouns, where Hokkaidō would use plain word order Chiri (1942: §68):

11.3 Allative onne and ene

onne marks direction and endpoint, ‘to, toward’, and with verbs of entering ‘into’ Chiri (1942: §123(129)), (Murasaki 2025: 21):

With verbs of perception the onne-phrase names the place a stimulus comes from — directionality construed from the perceiver:

The shorter allative ene — Chiri's Sakhalin entry ‘…へ’ (Chiri 1942: §123(103)) — attaches in the corpus almost always to relational nouns (empoke-ene ‘to under’, kaske-ene ‘onto’, onnayke ene ‘to inside’) and to deictics (hekimoh ene ‘toward the hills’), not to plain nouns; examples follow in §11.8. The interrogatives pattern with the particles: nakene ‘whither’, nahta ‘where’, nahwa ‘whence’ (Murasaki 2025: 21).

11.4 Ablative wa, orowa and terminative pahno

The ablative proper is wa ‘from’, segmentally identical to the converb particle ‘and’ (Chapter 23) but attached to noun phrases Chiri (1942: §123(157)). After a nasal it assimilates: kim-ma ‘from the mountains’ (kim wa), a fusion frequent enough (53 corpus tokens) that we treat it as lexicalised:

The expanded form orowa (‘from the place of’, oro-wa) does the same work with concrete sources and is the regular marker of the agent in passive-like indefinite constructions (Chapter 13) Chiri (1942: §123(137)); in Sakhalin the bare relational noun oro can stand for oro wa (Chiri 1942: §79).

The terminative pahno ‘until, as far as’ bounds a path, a time span, or a quantity: kunne pahno ‘until dark’ (Murasaki 2001: text 19), tani pahno ‘until now’ (Murasaki 2001: text 4), quantitative ‘as much as’ in example (11) of Chapter 10. The East-coast letters write it pak no:

Path through or along something is marked by the prosecutives kaari ‘through, via’ and okakara ‘along’ (Chiri 1942: §123(109), (127)): apa uturu kaari ‘through the gap of the door’ (Murasaki 2001: text 4), kina tun peka ‘through the grass’ with the areal peka (Kitahara et al. 2003), and:

11.5 Instrumental ani

ani marks instruments and materials and, by extension, cause; it is the Sakhalin (and Hidaka) counterpart of ari elsewhere Chiri (1942: §123(98)). Murasaki glosses it ‘by means of’ and her dialogues use the formula aynu itah ani ‘in Ainu’ Murasaki (2025: 13) — the same phrase with which Asai Take's interviewers begged her back from Japanese (aynu itah ani yee kanne ‘say it in Ainu’, (Murasaki 2001: text 37)).

Causal ani — ‘because of this’ (tampe ani) — is recorded by Chiri from Piłsudski's texts (Chiri 1942: §123(98)). In the Sentoku letters the instrument reading covers writing materials: pon cicay ani kanpi ‘a letter (written) on a small scrap’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1).

11.6 Comitative tura and turano

tura ‘together with’ is at bottom a transitive verb ‘accompany’, and much of its corpus life is verbal (tura ahun ‘went in with (her)’, tura makan ‘went up together’); postposed to a noun phrase it is the comitative case marker, optionally extended with adverbial -no, turano Chiri (1942: §123(153–154)).

Like the other particles, it has an anaphoric use without a host — example (7) above, turano ‘simultaneously with that’ — and a use with verbs, ‘while V-ing, as soon as V’ (cis turano ‘while crying’, humpa turano in (12)); Chiri registers both extensions (Chiri 1942: §123(153)). In the letters, tura coordinates noun phrases outright: Seraroka aynu Sakayhama aynu tura ‘the Seraroka people together with the Sakayhama people’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1). The reciprocal-marked adverb uturano ‘all together’ belongs to the same family (Murasaki 2025: 21).

11.7 Mutative ne

The copula ne ‘be’ (Chapter 18), used without person marking after a noun phrase, functions as a case particle of state: ‘as X’, ‘(turn) into X’ Chiri (1942: §123(121)). The commonest frames are with kara ‘make (into)’, koro ‘take as’ (mah ne koro ‘take as wife’, example (4) of Chapter 7), and verbs of becoming:

Chiri further records for Sakhalin a directional use of ne equivalent to ta, as in soy ne e-yah ‘you threw it outside’, and a temporal one (numan-ne ‘yesterday’) Chiri (1942: §123(121)); in the corpus this survives in fossilised adverbs (hekimoh ne ~ hekimoh ene ‘toward the hills’), and we take Chiri's ne here to be the reduced form of allative ene.

11.8 Relational nouns

Fine-grained spatial relations are encoded by a closed class of bound nouns that follow a reference-point noun phrase: the construction is [N (+POSS) + relational noun + case]. Chiri defines the class by its person marking: a relational noun cannot take the possessive suffix of Chapter 7 in its spatial use, and a pronominal reference point appears as an object prefix — en-ka ‘above me’, i-ka ‘above us’, never *an-kasi ‘my top’ Chiri (1942: §§78–79). Murasaki teaches the same pattern for Rayciska with the accusative person prefixes: en=empokehe ‘below me’, en=oponi ‘after me’ Murasaki (2025: 26); and the reciprocal prefix yields u-sam ‘next to each other’ (Dal Corso 2024: 74) — built on the relational noun sam ‘side’, not the homophonous verb sam ‘marry’ whose reciprocal u-sam means ‘marry each other’ (Chapter 14).

The inventory for Rayciska, with the locative -ta attached, is listed by Murasaki Murasaki (2025: 17–18): kaske ‘top (in contact)’ and elders' kaa; enkaske ‘above (detached)’ and elders' enkaa; kitayke ‘summit, source’; empoke ‘underside’; sanke ‘vicinity’; tunke ‘inside (a mass)’; noske ‘middle’; onnayke ‘inside (an enclosure)’; soyke ‘outside’. Chiri's island-wide list adds among others corpoke ‘under’, etoko ‘tip, front, before’, sam ‘beside’, oka(ke) ‘behind, after’, uturu ‘interval’, caa ‘edge, bank’ (Chiri 1942: §79). Most are built on monosyllabic roots (ka ‘up’, pok ‘down’, sam ‘side’) extended by -ke, which Chiri analyses as rhythmic rather than meaningful (Chiri 1942: §79).

With the locative the relational noun takes -ta directly:

Direction takes ene, and source takes wa, as already seen in (8); the three cases line up on one and the same relational noun, e.g. empoke-ta ‘under’ (17), empoke ene ‘to under (the pillow)’ (Murasaki 2001: text 52), empoke wa ‘from under’ (8):

Temporal uses follow the spatial ones: etoko ta ‘before’ (cep koyki etoko ta ‘before the fishing season’, (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1); iine too etoko ta ‘four days before’, (Chiri 1942: §79)) and okaaketa ‘after that’, ubiquitous in Asai Take's narration (Murasaki 2001: text 52).

When a relational noun is promoted to a referring noun — ‘the top’, ‘the inside’, ‘the tip’ as things — it rejoins the ordinary noun class and takes possessive morphology after all: Chiri notes substantivised kasike ‘face’, oske ‘heart’ (Chiri 1942: §78), Murasaki gives cih onnaykehe poro ‘the inside of the boat is big’ (Murasaki 2025: 17), and the corpus has:

11.9 Particle, relational noun, or clause linker?

The three categories of this chapter shade into one another, and several high-frequency items live on the boundary. The diagnostics we apply are host class (noun phrase vs verb/clause) and person marking (object prefixes mark relational nouns; particles take none).

kusu ‘because; in order to’ is in origin one of Chiri's ‘second-class formal nouns’ (kus ~ kusu) (Chiri 1942: §78), but synchronically it attaches to clauses, marking cause or purpose (Chiri 1942: §121(67)) — as in (5), (10) — and to interrogatives (hemata kusu ‘why’, (Murasaki 2025: 19)); clause linking is treated in Chapter 23.

renkayne is listed by Chiri twice, as a clause-linking particle ‘because, thanks to’ and as a case particle on nouns Chiri (1942: §121(79), §123(145)). The East-coast letters use the clausal value:

In Asai Take's West-coast tales, by contrast, renkayne is a quantifier ‘in numbers, plenty’ (Chapter 10), and the causal value is carried by kusu and ani. We analyse the two as one lexeme (ultimately renkay ‘will, consent’ plus ne, cf. an-renkayne ‘according to our wish’ in Dobrotvorsky's texts, (Dobrotvorsky 1875); (Sakaguchi 2021)) that grammaticalised along two routes — ‘by the will of, thanks to’ in the east, ‘to one's heart's content’ > ‘in plenty’ in the west. A dialect-split polysemy of this kind would be settled by causal tokens in West-coast narrative; we have found none in the corpus.

Finally, the particles themselves recruit verbal hosts. Instrumental ani on an infinitive verb yields ‘by V-ing’ (Chiri's Sakhalin example kira ani eh ‘came fleeing’, (Chiri 1942: §123(98))), and comitative turano on a verb means ‘as soon as’, (12). The converse also holds: ablative wa and the converb wa ‘and’ (Chiri 1942: §121(88)) are segmentally one item distinguished only by host class. Sakhalin Ainu thus presents a single postposed relator slot whose exponents are distributed over nominal and verbal hosts, with category labels — case particle, relational noun, conjunctive particle — naming positions on a grammaticalisation path rather than watertight classes.