Chapter 47External Possession and Possessor Raising

47.1 Overview

External possession (EP) refers to a construction in which the possessor of a noun appears as a core argument of the main predicate rather than as a modifier inside the possessed NP; the possessor is thereby assigned a grammatical function — typically subject or object — by the verb rather than by the nominal head (Nichols 1986: 56–70). Hokkaido Ainu lacks a dative-shift EP construction of the type common in European languages ('the wave hit him on the shoulder'). The constructions available instead belong to three morphosyntactic domains: (1) body-part noun incorporation (NI) that promotes the possessor to intransitive-subject position; (2) natural-force NI that promotes the former object to intransitive subject; and (3) the applicative prefixes, which raise a possessor or beneficiary into direct-object position. No read source applies the term "external possession" to Hokkaido Ainu directly; the label "possessor raising" (所有者の主語への昇格) enters the literature with Satō (2016) and is restated in Kobayashi (2025: 166–167, 173–175) ‹contested›.

The constructional background lies in the possession system. Body-part and kinship nouns are obligatorily possessed and take the affiliative form with the A-set person prefix whenever they occur with a specified possessor (see Chapter 43 (The Alienable/Inalienable Split and Possessive Classification)). When such a noun is incorporated into a predicate, the possessor — normally indexed on the noun — may migrate to a subject or object slot of the derived complex verb.

47.2 Body-part noun incorporation and possessor-to-subject raising

The most documented EP-equivalent in Hokkaido Ainu arises through body-part NI. When a body-part noun in its affiliative (possessed) form is incorporated into an intransitive verb, the resulting stem loses the person prefix on the noun; that person — the possessor — resurfaces as the intransitive subject of the derived verb Kobayashi (2025: 173). The derivational contrast is between the base clause, where the body-part affiliative carries an overt person prefix, and the incorporated clause, where the possessor appears only as the verb's subject suffix.

After NI, the possessor prefix detaches from the body-part noun and surfaces instead as the subject suffix of the complex predicate. Satō (2012: 8, cited in Kobayashi (2025: 173)) and Kobayashi (2025: 173) give the following contrast:

Kobayashi (2025: 173) characterises the promoting force as the higher discourse salience of the possessor relative to the body part, citing Satō's observation that "body-part nouns are prone to backgrounding because the possessor is felt to be more salient" (Satō 2012: 20–21, as quoted in Kobayashi (2025: 173)). This promoting force is NI-internal rather than a separate syntactic operation. The construction overlaps with the possessor-stranding cases treated in Chapter 89 (Subject Incorporation and Possessor-Stranding), where the possessor NP remains in the clause while the body-part noun is incorporated.

47.3 Natural-force noun incorporation and object-to-subject promotion

A second incorporation pathway produces an unaccusative from a transitive by incorporating the natural-force subject (wave, wind, current) of the base verb. Once incorporated, the natural force no longer occupies the subject position; the base object is promoted to intransitive subject of the derived verb Kobayashi (2025: 166–167).

Kobayashi (2025: 175–176) shows that the derived unaccusatives from natural-force NI feed the affiliative-type prefixes e- and o- (treated in the following section), because those prefixes select exclusively for unaccusative hosts. The two NI sub-types are therefore connected: body-part NI makes the erstwhile possessor the subject of a new intransitive; natural-force NI makes the erstwhile patient the subject of a new unaccusative that can undergo further derivation ‹corpus-confirmed›.

47.4 Affiliative-type prefixes e- and o-

Alongside the full applicative system, Kobayashi (2025: 171) identifies a set of affiliative-type prefixes (所属形的接頭辞): e- ‘its tip/head of —’ and o- ‘its base/tail-end of —’. These prefixes attach to a verb and function like the affiliative form of a possessed noun: they presuppose a contextual possessor without altering the verb's valence (valence impact: [0]). The following forms are documented in Kobayashi (2025: 171):

e- and o- in this function attach only to unaccusative intransitives — verbs whose sole argument is a theme or patient — not to unergatives (agent-subject intransitives) Kobayashi (2025: 171) ‹corpus-confirmed›. This selectional restriction links the affiliative-type prefix to natural-force NI: a transitive that undergoes natural-force NI becomes unaccusative and can then receive e-/o-.

The strings e- and o- are homophonous with the e- applicative and the o- applicative, which increase arity by one. The two uses are synchronically distinct in valence behaviour — the applicative adds an argument; the affiliative-type prefix does not — but this distinction requires verb-by-verb analysis and is not always surface-transparent Kobayashi (2025: 167) ‹contested›. The diagnostics for disambiguation are set out in Chapter 79 (The e- Applicative) and Chapter 81 (The o- Applicative).

47.5 The applicative route to external possession

The applicative prefixes ko-, e-, and o- each increase a verb's arity by one, promoting a peripheral participant — possessor, beneficiary, goal, or source — into the direct-object position Nakagawa (2024: 189, 424); Bugaeva (2006: 813); Bugaeva (2010: 749–751). When the promoted participant is the possessor of an NP already present in the clause, the result is a construction in which the possessor occupies object position rather than sitting inside the possessed NP — the closest Ainu structural equivalent of dative EP.

Kaiser (1998: 157–158) analyses a subset of these configurations as the interaction of NI with applicative formation: a body-part noun is incorporated while the applicative slot is filled by the body-part's possessor, yielding a complex predicate in which the possessor is the new object. Hokkaido Ainu tolerates such NI-plus-applicative stacks; their ordering and feeding relations are treated in Chapter 82 (Applicative Stacking, Ordering, and the Feeding of Relativization). In Bugaeva (2010: 756–760)'s typological survey (within the framework of (Peterson 2007)), the ko- applicative is the primary beneficiary/possessor-promotion prefix; e- adds a locative or goal; o- adds a source or endpoint. The per-applicative EP readings are documented in Chapter 80 (The ko- Applicative), Chapter 79 (The e- Applicative), and Chapter 81 (The o- Applicative), with the system-level typological placement in Chapter 78 (The Applicative System: Overview and the Preverb-vs-Applicative Debate).

47.6 The antipassive i- as a possessor-suppressor

When the possessor of an obligatorily possessed body-part or kinship noun is absent or non-coreferential with any clause argument, Hokkaido Ainu offers two morphological strategies Bugaeva (2021: 53–54). The first is the fourth-person (indefinite) A-prefix a= ‘4.A / unspecified possessor’, which keeps the noun in its full affiliative form and indexes an unspecified possessor (a=tekehe 'someone's hand'). The second is the derivational antipassive prefix i- ‘antipassive / NPN-marker’, which enables the body-part noun to be incorporated without possessive morphology — functioning as a non-possessed-noun (NPN) marker, comparable in function to a nominal absolutive Bugaeva (2021: 53–54, 81); Nam (2021: 62–74).

The two strategies differ in what they encode about the possessor. The a= strategy retains affiliative morphology and implies a vague but retrievable possessor; i- suppresses the possessor argument entirely, producing what Bugaeva (2021: 81) terms a non-possessible reading of the incorporated noun. In EP terms, i- is the inverse operation to possessor-raising: it removes the possessor from the noun's argument frame rather than promoting it to clause level, enabling fully possessor-free NI. For the broader function of i- as antipassive and detransitiviser, see Chapter 83 (The Antipassive / Detransitive i-). A related use of i= as the fourth-person object index — homophonous with the antipassive prefix but distinct in status — is documented in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms).

47.7 Competing analyses

The three mechanisms surveyed above have been described in distinct analytical vocabularies, and the descriptive literature does not converge on a unified formal account of "external possession" in Ainu.

Kobayashi (2025: 173–175), following Satō (2016), treats body-part NI possessor-raising as an NI-internal process: the incorporated noun's possessor is promoted to clause subject by virtue of the body-part's relative discourse-salience deficit, and the result is an unaccusative predicate. This account is accurate at the descriptive level but does not determine whether the promotion is syntactic movement or base-generation of the subject. Bugaeva (2021: 53–54) approaches the same facts through the lens of obligatory possession and argument structure: the inalienable body-part noun requires a possessor as its argument, and when that possessor is suppressed (by i-) or left unspecified (by a=), the possessor slot is de-activated rather than raised. She does not frame the resulting construction as possessor-raising. The applicative account in Kaiser (1998) treats the EP reading as the product of the applicative operation alone, with NI as an independent feeding process ‹contested›.

Whether these three routes — body-part NI promotion, natural-force NI promotion, and applicative object-promotion — constitute instances of a unified Ainu EP construction, or three typologically distinct processes that happen to yield similar interpretations, has not been resolved in the accessible literature ‹contested›. Placing the Ainu facts within Mithun (1984: 863–866)'s typology of NI types, body-part incorporation with possessor promotion would fall at the boundary between Type II (lexical-level compounding) and Type III (manipulation of discourse referents), but assigning the Ainu data precisely requires corpus evidence on whether an independent possessor NP can co-occur with the incorporated body-part noun — a question the sources consulted leave open ‹speculative›. The natural-force and applicative mechanisms sit closer to Type I (simple argument reduction) and to applicative constructions respectively; their co-existence in a polysynthetic head-marking language (Nichols 1986) is typologically expected Bugaeva (2021: 80–82).