Chapter 15Tense, aspect, and modality

15.1 The tenseless verb

A bare finite verb is read as present or past according to its lexical aspect. Chiri's rule: verbs of durative meaning (an ‘exist’, koro ‘have’, the copula, and the property verbs) translate as presents — his examples are mici an-koro ‘I have a grandchild’ and encu an-ne ‘I am an Ainu’ — while non-durative verbs used alone are past: oman is ‘he went’, not ‘he goes’, and Chiri took Batchelor to task for translating ku-kik as ‘I strike’ (Chiri 1942: §47). Temporal adverbs do the work that tense does elsewhere. Murasaki's minimal pair makes the point with one and the same verb form:

The attested time adverbs include tani ‘now’ (over a thousand tokens in our Sakhalin corpus; 1,016 in Asai Take's tales alone), tanto ‘today’, nuuman ‘yesterday’, simma ‘tomorrow’, nisahta ‘in the morning’ and kestoasinkoh ‘every day’; Murasaki's dialogues combine them freely with bare verbs, as in tanto nisahta ohorono ku=numa ‘this morning I got up late’ (Murasaki 2025: 19, 23, 27). Narrative prose behaves the same way: in Asai Take's tales the chains of bare verbs are past by default, and present-time reference inside dialogue is carried by tani or by the progressive periphrasis of §15.2.1. Where previous descriptions speak of a ‘future tense’ they mean the modal periphery of §15.4: the opposition is realis versus irrealis, not past versus non-past.

15.2 Aspect periphrases

The productive aspect markers are phrasal: a converb or purposive form of the lexical verb followed by an ‘exist’, kara ‘make’, isam ‘not exist’ or hemaka ‘finish’. Although formally biclausal, these sequences behave as single predicates — they relativize and nominalize as a unit, unlike true purpose or reason clauses — which is why Dal Corso calls them aspectual strategies rather than clause chains (Dal Corso 2018: 184). In the interlinear glosses we keep the pieces literal (kusu PURP, teh ‘and’, an ‘exist’); the aspectual reading belongs to the construction as a whole. Table 1 gives the inventory with the Hokkaidō counterparts that Chiri himself aligned (Chiri 1942: §45–46).

15.3 The perfect: postverbal an and ea

A bare an ‘exist’ directly after the verb — no converb — marks what Murasaki calls resultative-perfective (Murasaki 1976: 53): ahci suukawka an ‘the old woman has sewn’ contrasts minimally with the progressive ahci tani suukawka kusu an above (Dal Corso 2018: 181). Dal Corso's later work reads the same an as an imperfective which yields a continuous interpretation with atelic predicates (Dal Corso 2024: 72–73); the two accounts agree on the surface fact that postverbal an situates the reference time inside the post-event or ongoing state, and differ on which class of predicate is basic. The east coast has beside it a form ea, unknown to the western corpora: Chiri records it as a durative particle, ‘be in the course of V-ing’ — the intra-event value that, as §15.2.1 showed, keeps it apart from the prospective kusu kara (Chiri 1942: §45, §118) — and in Piłsudski's texts it serves as a perfect, hosting the -hV nominalization in questions — proof that verb plus ea has fused into a single predicate (Dal Corso 2018: 182). The origin of ea is the open question, and it bears directly on the Hokkaidō comparison. Hokkaidō builds its actional perfect on the particle a (plural rok), which continues the verb ‘sit’; if ea contains the same verb, the two perfects are cognate. Dal Corso argues instead that ea is e-an with the nasal elided, pointing out that it co-occurs with the progressive kusu an on atelic predicates (Dal Corso 2024: 71–73) — a distribution that sits more naturally with the existential than with a posture verb. On that analysis the east-coast perfect is a Sakhalin-internal creation from an, the same building block as the postverbal an just described, and its resemblance to the Hokkaidō a perfect is convergence rather than common inheritance.

15.4 Future and intention

Unrealised events are marked by kusu and its compounds. The simplest pattern is predicate-final kusu, the regular future-intentional of conversation: Kusiro onne ku=oman kusu ‘I am going to Kushiro’ (Murasaki 2025: 19, 23); Chiri classed this kusu as the volitional mood of the formal noun kus(u) (Chiri 1942: §80), and Tangiku glosses it ‘intention’ (Tangiku 2022: §8.5).

Fuller periphrases add a verb to kusu: kusu ne with the copula and kusu iki with iki ‘do’. Both are the staple future of Sentoku Tarōji's letters, which, being real correspondence about plans, attest the intentional reading outside elicitation:

The formal nouns kun ~ kuni build the expectative, Chiri's 予期法 ‘what is bound or supposed to happen’ (Chiri 1942: §80): kun pe ne ‘is going to, is supposed to’ (examples in Chapter 13) and the periphrasis kun ki, attested already in Dobrotvorsky's nineteenth-century west-coast speeches:

kuni also serves as the complementizer of expected events (Chapter 22). Epistemic futures add the dubitative nanko ‘probably’ ~ nankoro: ukoramupirika an-ki nanko ‘I will (probably) make peace’ in the same Dobrotvorsky speech (Dobrotvorsky 1875), (Sakaguchi 2021); Chiri derives nankoro from nan koro ‘have the face of’ (Chiri 1942: §118).

The shape of the dubitative differs tellingly between Sakhalin and Hokkaidō. Hokkaidō places bare nankor after the finite verb; the Sakhalin corpora far more often show nee nanko(ro), copula first, with the lexical verb in the possessive nominalization of §20.3. Bugaeva reads the prefixed copula as the fingerprint of how the modal field arose: the Sakhalin finite clause is habitually a nominalization closed by ne(e) — an originally equational, biclausal structure that has tightened into a single complex predicate (Dal Corso (2018: §5.2.2)) — and the modal particles grammaticalized inside that frame, fusing with the copula they followed (Bugaeva 2016: 106–107, 113). The future kusu ne above is the same recruitment of the copula at an earlier stage, and the family extends to the affirmative neeko ‘surely’, the dubitative nean, and the assertive nankoro pe ne of Chapter 22. The host also lets mood stack transparently on aspect: in Fujiyama Haru's nuu-hci teh an-i-hi nee nanko ‘she must have heard it’, the dubitative rides on the copula, which rides on the nominalized resultative teh an of §15.2.2 (Bugaeva 2022: Sakhalin text (Dal Corso), ex. 25).

15.5 Desiderative

The desiderative is rusuy, in Sakhalin as in Hokkaidō (Chiri 1942: §118), (Murasaki 1976: 53), (Murasaki 2025). It follows the verb directly and is frequent: 92 tokens in Asai Take's tales (our count). With koro ‘have’ it fuses to kon rusuy ‘want (a thing)’ — eani hemata e-kon-rusuy? ‘what do you want?’ (text 35) — and Murasaki lists the negative counterpart etunne ‘not want to’ among the auxiliaries (Murasaki 1976: 53).

15.6 Potential

Ability is expressed by easkay ‘be able’ and inability by koyaykus ‘be unable’ (east coast also eaykah); all three descend from full verbs and may still take person prefixes, but normally follow the bare lexical verb as auxiliaries (Chiri 1942: §118), (Murasaki 1976: 53). Syntactically they take a nominalized notional verb as complement — the notional verb can host nominal particles like ka ‘even’ — so Dal Corso classes them with the light verbs (Dal Corso 2018: 185). In Asai Take's tales the negative is five times as frequent as the positive: we count 49 tokens of koyaykus(-ahci) against 10 of easkay(-ahci) — failure drives plots.

With the prospective of §15.2.1 the negative potential yields the frustrated attempt: okoyse kusu kara koyaykus ‘he tried to urinate but could not’ (text 52). One further form deserves a note of caution: Dobrotvorsky's dialogues contain a single eska (ene eska e-ki kusu ne yay), formally reminiscent of easkay, but Sakaguchi, whose edition we follow, leaves its meaning undetermined (Sakaguchi 2021: 50); we do not build on it.

15.7 Imperative and hortative

The imperative is the bare stem: oman! ‘go!’ (Chiri 1942: §26). No suffix creates the command; the particles that accompany imperatives modulate number and politeness. For plural addressees the particle yan is added — in Sakhalin, as Chiri stresses, yan attaches to plural verb forms and marks plurality of the addressee rather than creating the imperative itself (Chiri 1942: §119); the same -yan reappears inside the first–second person interaction paradigm (Chapter 13).

Two final particles soften the command: waa ‘do (please)’ and kanne ‘please, kindly’ — en=oponi eh waa ‘come along behind me’, ponno en=teere kanne ‘please wait a little’ (Murasaki 2025: 27). Chiri identifies kane ~ kanne as the Sakhalin equivalent of Hokkaidō imperative hani (Chiri 1942: §119), and nankoro supplies a still more ceremonious second-person command (Chiri 1942: §118). The prohibitive is built with the preverbal negator hanka (Chapter 17).

For the hortative ‘let us’ Chiri notes the absence of Hokkaidō ro in his Sakhalin data, citing instead ke mosso paye-an-hcin! ‘come, let us go quickly!’ (Chiri 1942: §119) — the indefinite suffix -an (Chapter 13) on a plural stem, optionally reinforced by -hci(n). Since the indefinite is the ordinary inclusive ‘we’, a first-person-plural command needs no further marking; interjections (ke(h) ‘well then!’) and the particle anaa supply the invitation: tani paye=an anaa ‘come on, let us go now’ (Murasaki 2025: 23).