The interaction of noun incorporation and applicative formation in Ainu

Abstract

Accounting for the morphosyntactic properties of Ainu (a nearly extinct language-isolate spoken on the northern-most islands of Japan) presents many challenges. Although its syntactic word-order is quite rigidly soy (Shibatani 1990: 17,22–24), the word-internal ordering of its polysynthetic verbal morphology allows different permutations. This is especially true in complex verb-forms involving both noun incorporation (NI) and applicative formation (AF). As the data presented in this paper will show, the interaction of these two processes yields not only the expected morphemic orderings, but also apparent MIRROR PRINCIPLE (Baker 1995) violations in which the attested morphemic orders do not match the “feeding” relationship of the rules that add those morphemes.

I am especially grateful to Steve Anderson, as well as to Mark Baker, Larry Horn, Masayoshi Shibatani, and anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts for their very insightful comments. Many thanks also go to four Ainu specialists for help with the date and resources: Hiroshi Nakagawa (Chiba University), Osami Okuda (Sapporo Gakuin University), Masayoshi Shibatani (Kobe University), and Alexander Vovin (University of Hawaii). This paper has additionally benefited from audience comments on an earlier version presented at the Western Conference of Linguistics (WECOL) at University of California, Santa Cruz on October 25, 1996. Of course, I alone am responsible for any remaining errors.

The following glosses are used: 1=1st person; A=transitive subject; APPL=applicative; CAUS=causative; IMP=imperative; INDEF=indefinite; ITERA=iterative; NEG.ADV=negation adverb; NML=nominalizer; O=object; PL=plural; POSS=possessed; REFL=reflexive; S=intransitive subject; s=singular.

The translations of the examples from (Kindaichi 1993) and (Kindaichi & Chiri 1936 (K&C) were originally in Japanese, and many times word-for-word glosses were not given. Therefore, in translating these examples into English I have relied on a number of additional resource materials, including: (Batchelor 1926, Hattori 1964, and Shibatani 1990). Also, I have made a few minor changes to the glosses and translations for some of the examples from (Shibatani 1990) in order to clarity the structure or grammatical categories in certain potentially ambiguous cases. Nono of these changes, however, have affected the basic meaning, and any such changes have been confirmed by information available in the additional Ainu resources.