Chapter 14Valency-changing morphology

14.1 Causatives

The productive causative is -te ~ -re: -re after vowel-final stems, -te after consonant-final ones (Chiri 1942: §55), (Tangiku 1998: 229–230), (Tangiku 2022). For the verbs in -rV the choice follows from the two stem classes established in Chapter 5: a Class I verb (underlying /r/) counts as consonant-final and takes -te with the regular shift of r to n (kor-te → konte ‘give’), while a Class II verb (lexically vowel-final) takes -re like any vowel stem. Citation forms that look identical therefore part ways under the suffix — nukara → nukante but kira → kirare — and the causative is in practice the readiest test of a verb's class membership. Hokkaidō's third allomorph -e after r (kor-e, nukar-e) is replaced in Sakhalin by -te (Chiri 1942: §55), so the -nte causatives are among the clearest Sakhalin-defining forms in the verbal morphology. Table 1 lists base ~ causative pairs for which both members are attested in Sakhalin sources.

The meaning runs the whole causative range from coercion to giving and letting: konte ‘cause to have’ is the ordinary verb ‘give’, and Chiri analysed apparent datives as causees on exactly these verbs (Chiri 1942: §68). The causee is the indexed object (in=konte ‘give me’, eci=nu-re ‘I will let you hear’; Chapter 13).

Three minor causative formatives partition the lexicon with -te/-re. (i) -ke pairs with the n/p number stems (Chapter 12): singular ahun-ke ‘put one in’ against plural ahup-te ‘put many in’, so that the suffix choice itself signals object number (Chiri 1942: §§36, 55); the corpus supplies asinke, ahunke, makanke and the east-coast an-e-makan-ke ‘I sent you uphill’ ((Piłsudski 1912: text 22); (Sakaguchi 2024: ex. 3-33)). (ii) -ka derives causatives chiefly from property and posture verbs: tuhse-ka ‘kick’ above, hosipi-ka ‘send back’ (Chiri 1942: §55). (iii) The thematic vowels -a/-i/-u/-e/-o transitivise bare roots (mak-a ‘open’, as-i ‘stand sth up’) (Chiri 1942: §55). Finally -yara is the indefinite-causee causative, ‘have people do’: Chiri's e-yara ‘have (people) eat’ (Chiri 1942: §55), and lexicalised in sinukarara ‘show oneself off’ from si-nukara-yara ‘have people look at oneself’ (Murasaki 1979), (Tangiku 1998: 229–230).

Stacked causatives of the shape -te-re or -re-te do not occur in the corpus or in the descriptions we control. Double causation is instead expressed by a causative over an already derived stem (ipe-re on antipassive ipe, sinukarara with reflexive plus -yara) or analytically with the light verb ki. We take the gap to be real and systematic — the causee slot, once filled, is not reopened — though a form like nukante-yara ‘have people show’ would be the expected shape if it were; finding one in unpublished recordings would settle the point.

14.2 Applicatives

The applicative prefixes promote an oblique participant to object, transitivising intransitives and ditransitivising transitives. The three are not interchangeable: the choice tracks the semantic role of the promoted argument (Dal Corso 2024: 71). e- covers location, goal, topic (‘about’), path, instrument, purpose, cause and accompaniment — Chiri illustrates each for Sakhalin, e.g. neampe an-e-mina ‘we laughed about it’ from mina ‘laugh’, oya kotan e-oman ‘he went to another village’ (Chiri 1942: §§33, 56). ko- adds a goal or addressee, typically a person (Chiri 1942: §58); o- adds places only (Chiri 1942: §57). For the southern Hokkaidō dialects Bugaeva's corpus study (Bugaeva 2006: 188–193) quantifies the same division of labour — ko- the most and o- the least frequent, with about a third of all verb lexemes containing an applicative — and the Sakhalin corpus matches that ranking, as set out below.

Piłsudski's corpus also shows ko- in a use where no applied object can be recovered, on zero-valent weather predicates; Dal Corso reads this as a relic of a broader high-transitivity function of the prefix (Dal Corso 2024: 73):

The prefix o- is marginal in the Sakhalin corpus: we find it only inside lexicalised place-object verbs (Chiri's locative sense, §57), never as a live alternation parallel to the e- pair above. We treat it as a closed lexical class in Sakhalin, against its modest productivity in Hokkaidō (Bugaeva 2006: 193). Applicatives also feed the rest of the system: an applied object is incorporable (§14.6), and the applicative slot is what reciprocal and reflexive prefixes fill in combinations like u-ko- and yay-ko- (§14.7).

14.3 The antipassive i-

Prefixed to a transitive verb, i- suppresses the object, yielding an intransitive of generic activity: ‘the unspecified, the usual thing’ is understood. Chiri glosses it ‘things’ and lists Sakhalin examples in which the conventionalised object has lexicalised: i-ku ‘drink (i.e. liquor)’ from ku ‘drink’, inkara ‘look (about)’ from i-nukar(a), i-ruska ‘be angry’ from ruska ‘resent sth’ (Chiri 1942: §51). The pair ipe ‘have a meal’ beside transitive ee ‘eat’ (from i-e) is the showcase: the two verbs even split as complete versus incomplete predicates in Chiri's classification (Chiri 1942: §30). All four are richly attested in the corpus; inu ‘listen’ (i-nu ‘hear things’) joins them in the Rayciska recordings.

The antipassive output re-enters derivation freely: ipe-re ‘give a meal to’ (§14.1) causativises it, and inkara behaves as an underlying r-stem (inkan rusuy, Chapter 12). The prefix is segmentally identical to the indefinite object marker i-, from which it historically derives; the synchronic division — referential first-person or logophoric reading for the agreement marker, generic-object reading here — is drawn in Chapter 13. In our corpus counts, productive (non-lexicalised) antipassives are rare: the construction survives chiefly in the conventionalised activity verbs listed above, which the dictionaries already treat as lemmas ((Hattori 1964)).

14.4 Reflexives yay- and si-

The reflexive yay-, from the root ‘self’, intransitivises a transitive verb, identifying agent and patient: yay-rayki ‘kill oneself’, yay-nuyna ‘hide oneself’ (Chiri 1942: §53). The valency decrease is visible in person marking: east-coast yay-reske-an ‘I raised myself’ takes the intransitive suffix where reske ‘raise’ takes prefixes (Dal Corso 2024: 73–74).

A second pattern leaves valency intact: yay- marks the possessor of an incorporated noun, coreferent with the subject — the ‘quasi-possessive reflexive’ (Bugaeva and Kobayashi, in (Bugaeva 2022)). Piłsudski's yay-cise-koro ‘have a house of one's own’ (Piłsudski 1912: 238), (Dal Corso 2024: 74) recurs verbatim in Asai Take's tales:

Lexicalised yayko- (reflexive plus applicative) means ‘by oneself, within oneself’ (Chiri 1942: §25); the nineteenth-century west-coast conversations use it in verbs of mental settlement:

The parallel prefix si- covers the middle range: with plain transitives ‘oneself’ (si-etaye ‘draw back’), with causatives ‘get oneself V-ed’ (si-kasuy-re ‘get oneself helped’) and ‘feign’ (si-ray-re ‘play dead’) (Chiri 1942: §53); Sakhalin sinukarara ‘show oneself off’ (§14.1) builds on it. In the corpus yay- outnumbers si- by an order of magnitude, and only yay- shows the possessive-reflexive use — a distributional statement that is our own.

14.5 Reciprocal and sociative u-

The prefix u- ‘each other’ intransitivises a transitive verb just as the reflexive does (Chiri 1942: §52). Corpus pairs include sam ‘marry’ → u-sam ‘marry each other’, nukara ‘see’ → u-nukara ‘meet’ ((Murasaki 2001: text 34)), koyki ‘attack, beat’ → u-koyki ‘fight one another’:

Beside true reciprocity, u- has a sociative-collective use that Chiri singles out as characteristically Sakhalin: on intransitives, with or without a causative, it means ‘in numbers, all together’, sometimes amounting to mere plurality — utara u-mokon-te ‘the people slept’, u-ariki-re ‘they came along’ (Chiri 1942: §52). Sentoku's letters supply both this and the combination with ko-:

Lexicalisation has gone furthest in ukoyki itself. In the same letter Sentoku writes cep ukoyki an=e-hci, which Tangiku and Ogihara translate ‘we catch a little fish and eat it’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1) — here ukoyki is not ‘fight each other’ but the collective activity verb ‘take (fish), do the fishing’, built on koyki ‘attack, catch (game)’; in Letter 3 it serves as a plain noun, ukoyki porono an ‘the catch was plentiful’ (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 3). The reciprocal, sociative and lexical readings shade into one another along a path the corpus shows still open.

14.6 Noun incorporation

A noun in its bare conceptual form may be compounded into the verb, ceasing to be a syntactic argument (Chiri 1942: §§24–25), (Tangiku 2022). The canonical case incorporates the object of a transitive activity verb:

That these are words and not object–verb phrases is shown by three convergent facts, which we state from our corpus analysis. First, the plural suffix treats the whole as one stem: cehkoyki-hci ‘they caught fish’, ehahtaa-hci ‘they dug lily roots’, with -hci outside noun plus verb. Second, the incorporated noun is non-referential and unmodifiable: a counted or possessed object always stands outside (ponno ponno cep ukoyki ‘catch a few fish’, Letter 1). Third, the complex serves as a bare complement of kusu ‘in order to’ exactly like a simple verb, as above. The same nouns occur loose with the light verb (ceh kii, ehah taa as two words, Chapter 12), so univerbation is a gradient the speakers exploit.

Which argument incorporates is constrained by grammatical relation. Shibatani's survey of Ainu concluded that incorporation targets objects (including derived, applicative objects) and patient-like intransitive subjects, obliques only after applicative promotion (Shibatani 1988: 210–211); Satō's Hokkaidō counts give object incorporation 85.9 percent, natural-force subject incorporation (sir-pirka type) 6.8 percent, with possessor-stranding and transitive-subject incorporation marginal (Satō 2022: ch. 16, in (Bugaeva 2022)). The Sakhalin corpus fits: object incorporation as above; subject incorporation in the weather verbs (siri-pirika, Chapter 12); and incorporation of a promoted locative object in cip-oo ‘ride in a boat’ (cip ‘boat’ with o(o) ‘sit in’):

Incorporation also interlocks with the other voices: yay- rides on an incorporated possessed noun (yay-cise-koro, §14.4), and body-part incorporation underlies lexical prefixes like he- ‘head’ and ho- ‘rear’, which Chiri groups with the detransitivisers (he-pen-u ‘raise one's face’) (Chiri 1942: §§33, 41).

14.7 Combinations and productivity

The valency machinery is freely recursive within fixed scope: each prefix construes with everything to its right, so the outermost prefix corresponds to the outermost derivation. Attested Sakhalin stackings include u-ko- (reciprocal filling the applicative's object slot: u-ko-itak ‘talk to each other’ (Chiri 1942: §25), u-ko-pakari above), yay-ko- (§14.4), ko-yay- (applicative over a reflexive base: an=e=ko-yay-irayki, §14.2), causative over antipassive (ipe-re), reflexive plus indefinite causative (si-nukara-yara), and applicative over reflexive-applicative:

Our productivity assessment from the corpus, text frequencies weighed against type counts, is as follows. Fully productive: causative -te/-re (new formations on loanwords and derived stems; no lexical gaps observed) and the reciprocal u-. Productive but lexically anchored: yay-, applicative ko- and e- — most tokens belong to recurring lexemes, yet fresh combinations occur in single texts. Closed or fossilised: applicative o-, antipassive i-, si-, the causatives -ka, -ke (alive only inside the number-paired motion verbs) and -yara. Object incorporation sits in between: the pattern is well represented but its productive core is a small set of subsistence-activity verbs. Dal Corso reaches a compatible conclusion from the other direction, observing that the secondary, valency-preserving functions of e-, ko- and yay- common in Piłsudski's 1900s east-coast corpus have all but vanished from the west-coast recordings of the 1960s, an erosion he connects with the general loss of productive verbal morphology under Japanese contact (Dal Corso 2024: 70–71). The system the last speakers kept intact was the core: causative, reciprocal, reflexive, and the lexicalised stock of everything else.