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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton August 7, 2023

On the object-individuation function of the East Sakhalin Ainu impersonal passive

  • Elia Dal Corso ORCID logo EMAIL logo
From the journal Folia Linguistica

Abstract

This paper presents an account of a Sakhalin Ainu (also Enciw‘itah, isolate, Russia and Japan) construction that semantically encodes an agent-patient interaction and that is characterized morphosyntactically by the expression of the agent with an oblique. In the analysis to follow, this construction is named ‘impersonal passive’ by analogy with a structurally and functionally similar construction attested in the Southern Hokkaidō dialects of Ainu. Keeping the main focus on eastern dialects, the paper takes a primarily semantic approach to the East Sakhalin Ainu impersonal passive and underlines a number of striking structural differences with the Hokkaidō counterpart. In addition, it will be argued that in the north-eastern dialects of Sakhalin Ainu, the impersonal passive can be described as an object-individuation construction (oic), which marks a patient object as referential and definite and has the pragmatic extension of overtly flagging the topicality of this object at the discourse level. As such, the oic compensates for the lack or non-obligatoriness of overt marking for definiteness and topicality in Sakhalin Ainu. The present paper adds to our knowledge on the still under-described Sakhalin variety of Ainu and to our understanding of the verbal and nominal semantics of Ainu more generally, which to date remains a largely unexplored topic.


Corresponding author: Elia Dal Corso, Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Via Emilia all’Angelo 50, 42124, Reggio Emilia (RE), Italy, E-mail:

List of glosses

1p

first-person plural

1s

first-person singular

2p

second-person plural

2s

second-person singular

3p

third-person plural

3s

third-person singular

a

transitive subject

abl/ela

ablative/elative

acc

accusative

adv

adverbial

all

allative

appl

applicative

cau/fin

causal-final clause linker

caus

causative

coll

collective

cop

copula

dat

dative

dir.rsn

direct evidential (reasoning)

eph

emphatic particle

exc

exclusive

inc

inclusive

indf

indefinite person

io

indirect object

ipfv

imperfective

ist

instantaneous clause linker

loc/lat

locative/lative

nmlz

nominalizer

nom

nominative

npst

non-past

o

object

pass

passive

pc

paucal

pfv

perfective

pk

personal knowledge evidential

pl

plural

poss

possessive

prm

participant-referentiality mismatch marker

psr

possessor

ptv

partitive

refl

reflexive

rep

reportative evidential

s

intransitive subject

sgst

suggestive final particle

sgv

singulative

superl

superlative

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Received: 2022-12-05
Accepted: 2023-07-25
Published Online: 2023-08-07
Published in Print: 2023-11-27

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