Chapter 6Word classes

6.5.1 Postpositions and case particles

Grammatical relations of place, goal, source, instrument and company are marked by postpositions, Chiri's fourth particle class, which attach only to nouns (Chiri 1942: §122): ta and ohta ‘at, in’, onne ‘to’, ene ‘towards’, orowa ‘from; and then’, ani ‘with, by means of’, tura ‘together with’, kaari ‘along, through’, poka ‘through, by way of’, pahno ‘as far as’. Common nouns require ohta (historically oro-ta) where locative nouns take bare ta — the main distributional test separating the two noun subclasses (§6.2). The full inventory and its syntax are given in Chapter 11.

6.5.2 Demonstratives and other adnominals

Adnominals (Chiri's 連体詞) modify a noun and do nothing else: they head no phrase, take no person marking, and never serve as predicates (Chiri 1942: §92). The Sakhalin demonstrative set is proximal tan ‘this’, distal tara ‘that yonder’ (also tara-an), against Hokkaidō toan; Chiri cites tara seta ‘that dog’ from Piłsudski (Chiri 1942: §97). In the corpus of Asai Take 浅井タケ the anaphoric neya ‘that aforementioned’ picks up an established referent, the pronominal tah ‘this one’ refers to things, and taa serves chiefly as a discourse particle of staging (glossed EMPH). Demonstratives and numerals may stack, in that order, but two demonstratives may not (Chiri 1942: §94). sine ‘one’ doubles as an indefinite article-like marker, ‘a certain’ (Chiri 1942: §115), as in (10) below. See further Chapter 9.

6.5.3 Numerals

Numerals pattern with adnominals: sine ‘one’, tu ‘two’ (tuh), re ‘three’ (reh) and so on stand before a counted noun and cannot stand alone; to count in isolation they must be nominalized by a classifier, -p/-pe for things, -n for people, pis for ‘pieces’ (Chiri 1942: §113). The system is vigesimal (hoh ‘twenty’, (Chiri 1942: §108)), and Sakhalin speakers also used a decimal series borrowed through the Amur (“Santan”) trade, sine kunkutu ‘ten’, sine tanku ‘hundred’ Chiri (1942: §112), (Murasaki 2009), (Sakaguchi 2022). Chapter 10 gives the full system.

6.5.4 Adverbs

Adverbs modify a predicate or a whole clause and are themselves uninflected: they take no person, number, mood or case morphology, which is what separates them from verbs and nouns, and they precede the element they modify rather than following it, which separates them from the particles. Chiri sets the adverb (副詞) up as a class of its own, distinct from both the nominals and the adnominals, and notes that the Sakhalin adverb lexicon diverges considerably from Hokkaidō (Chiri 1942: §§64, 88). The class has three morphological sources. (i) A small closed set of underived adverbs, mostly temporal, aspectual and degree words: tani ‘now’, suy ‘again’, naa ‘still, more’, ramma ‘always’, reekoh ‘very’, ponno ‘a little’. (ii) A large open set of manner adverbs derived from property verbs by the adverbializer -no (§6.4): pirika-no ‘well’ from pirika ‘be good’, monas-no ‘quickly, at once’ from monas ‘be quick’ (Chiri 1942: §64). Because any property verb can feed it, this is where the productivity of the class lies; the underived core stays small. (iii) Reduplicated and expressive adverbs, in which a base is doubled for intensity or distributed reading — ponno ponno ‘just a little, bit by bit’ (example 2 above, and the ‘skip a little’ of Asai Take's ponno ponno…cooko) — continuous with the lexical reduplication described in Chapter 5 (Morphophonology).

By meaning the inventory falls into a handful of classes. Temporal adverbs locate the event in time: tani ‘now’, ubiquitous in the Asai corpus as a narrative ‘now, at this point’, tanto ‘today’, nuuman ‘yesterday’, simma ‘tomorrow’ (simma e=oman ‘go tomorrow’, Asai Take). Since the verb has no tense (§15.1), these words carry much of the temporal location that inflection does elsewhere. Aspectual and frequency adverbs quantify over occurrences: suy ‘again’, the commonest of all, which restarts an episode in narrative; naa ‘still, yet’, which in Sentoku Tarōji's letters marks a state as continuing (naa…e=an ‘you are still there’); and ramma ‘always, as ever’, likewise from the Sentoku letters (ramma ka pirika ‘are well as ever’). The completive notion ‘finish doing’ is carried not by an adverb but by the verb hemaka ‘finish’ (Chapter 15), the iterative-habitual by the conjunctive koh (Chapter 15). Degree adverbs scale the predicate: intensifying reekoh ‘very’, which the Karafuto wordlists label explicitly as an adverb ‘very, exceedingly’; diminishing ponno ‘a little’; and the quantifier-like okore ‘all’ (okore oyra ‘forget all’), the Sakhalin counterpart of Hokkaidō opitta, whose own reflex opista the corpus uses only in the Sentoku letters. Manner adverbs are chiefly the -no class, joined by the demonstrative-based nah ‘thus, so’ ‘in that way’ (nah kii ‘do so’) and ene ‘like this’. The deictic and directional adverbs — teeta ‘here’, ene and their kin — pattern with the demonstrative system and are treated under it (Chapter 9).

Syntactically, adverbs are not arguments and take no postposition; they attach to the predicate rather than to a noun. The default position is immediately before the constituent modified — degree adverbs hug the property verb, as reekoh pirika in the second example, and manner -no adverbs sit just before their verb, as pirika-no reske ‘raised (the child) well’ in (7) — while temporal and aspectual adverbs with clausal scope favour clause-initial position, as suy and tani repeatedly do in narrative. Two neighbouring devices are not part of this class. Negative polarity is not adverbial: it is built on the ham-family negators (hannehka, hanki, the proclitic ham=) and the negative existential isam, all treated in Chapter 17. And the scalar-additive ka, kayki and the restrictive pateh ‘only’ are clitic focus particles, placed after their host rather than before it (§24.2). The interaction of adverb placement with the basic verb-final order of the clause is taken up in Chapter 19 (The simple clause and word order).

6.5.5 Conjunctive particles

Clause linkage is managed by clause-final conjunctive particles, Chiri's third particle class (Chiri 1942: §120): sequential teh ‘and’ (the Sakhalin counterpart of Hokkaidō wa, (Chiri 1942: §121)) and wa, both glossed ‘and’ in this grammar; ike ‘and, and then’; causal kusu ‘because’ and renkayne ‘because of’; concessive yahka and yahkayki ‘although’; conditional anah ‘if’, ciki ‘if’, cikin ‘if’; habitual-correlative koh ‘whenever’. kusu also marks purpose, and with a following existential builds an incipient progressive (kayo kusu an ‘is calling’, Chapter 15). The division of labour among these linkers is the subject of Chapter 23. Example (14) shows anah with the first person plural exclusive set; (15) shows yahkayki and teh.

6.5.6 Sentence-final and discourse particles

The right edge of the Sakhalin sentence carries a rich set of particles. The reportative manu closes nearly every narrative sentence of the Asai corpus and marks the content as transmitted knowledge; it belongs to the evidential system described in Chapter 16 ((Dal Corso 2018); (Chiri 1942: §117) classes it among the mood particles). The quotative nah closes direct speech before a verb of saying or thinking (Chapter 22). The additive-scalar ka ‘even, too’ follows nouns and converbal clauses; the topic particles anak and anakne, prominent in Hokkaidō, are largely supplanted in the corpus by the construction with neampe (Chapter 24). Emotive and interactional particles include interrogative hee, softening waa (example 10 of Chapter 7), and na of assertion; Chiri's minimal pair is seta he? ‘a dog?’ against seta un! ‘a dog!’ (Chiri 1942: §128).

6.5.7 Interjections

Interjections stand outside clause syntax: attention-calling iineahsuy ‘say, hey’, which opens requests and questions throughout the Asai corpus (so in example 10 of Chapter 7); keh ‘well then’ in (14) above; assenting ee ‘yes’. They take no morphology and combine with no particle, which is what distinguishes them from adverbs.