Chapter 89Subject Incorporation and Possessor-Stranding

89.1 Two kinds of subject incorporation

Object incorporation accounts for the overwhelming majority of Ainu noun incorporation, but the language also incorporates subjects. Satō's Chitose count places subject incorporation at about 14% of all incorporation tokens, divided into three functional subtypes that differ in which noun is incorporated, what happens to the verb's valency, and whether an external possessor must be retained Satō (2022: §3); Satō (2016: 83–84).

These figures come from the corpus of the late Shirasawa Nabe (Chitose) and reflect one idiolect; no pan-Hokkaido NI-type frequency study has been published ‹corpus-suggested›. The wordhood diagnostic is the same as for object incorporation: because the person index is the outermost element of the verb word, an incorporated noun must sit inside it, and a fourth-person S suffix on a normally transitive base is decisive proof of intransitivisation Nakagawa (2024: 482–483); Satō (2022: §2). The broader valency architecture is in Chapter 73 (Valency, Voice, and Noun Incorporation: Overview), and object incorporation in Chapter 88 (Object (Patient) Noun Incorporation).

89.2 Natural-force intransitive subject NI

The incorporated noun in this subtype is not a full lexical noun but a bound stem denoting a natural force or ambient condition. Two such stems are attested in Hokkaido: sir ‘weather, appearance, land’ and me ‘cold’ Satō (2022: §3.2); Nakagawa (2024: 489). Neither appears as an independent subject noun alongside the same predicate — the phrasal counterpart does not exist — which distinguishes this subtype sharply from object incorporation, where phrasal and incorporated forms often alternate Satō (2022: §3.2). Nakagawa groups these predicates among the zero-place verbs of the verb-class system; their person-prefix behaviour confirms that status, since the zero-arity result takes no person affixes in its basic meteorological use Nakagawa (2024: 489).

The weather stem sir ‘weather’ combines with stative predicates to form a set of meteorological expressions: sirpirka ‘the weather is fine’, sirkunne ‘it is dark, night falls’, sirsesek ‘the weather is hot’, sirmeman ‘the weather is cool’, and similar. The corpus count for sirpirka stands at 147 tokens (rank 873), confirming its standing as the most frequent member of the set ‹corpus-confirmed›. The cold stem me ‘cold’ functions identically: me-an 'it is cold' incorporates me as the subject of the existential an, again without an independent-noun counterpart Satō (2022: §3.2).

Nakagawa's subclassification requires that the incorporated noun appear in its concept form (裸形), as opposed to the possessed form that characterises the possessor-requiring subtype below Nakagawa (2024: 489). The two forms — concept and possessed — are treated in Chapter 44 (Concept Form vs. Affiliative (Possessed) Form).

89.3 Possessor-requiring intransitive subject NI and possessor stranding

The second intransitive subtype incorporates a body-part or relational noun that grammatically requires a possessor. Because the incorporated noun carries its possessive morphology into the verb word, that possessor must surface as an external argument — the phenomenon Satō terms possessor stranding Satō (2022: §3.3); Satō (2016: 87–89). This corresponds to Mithun's Type II: the construction rearranges grammatical relations rather than merely lexically compounding (Mithun 1984); Satō (2022: §3.3).

The mechanism is this: a stative intransitive verb whose S argument is a body-part noun takes that noun in its possessed form (所属形) and incorporates it. The possessed form grammatically encodes that the noun belongs to someone; that possessor must therefore be supplied from outside the incorporated complex, and it is promoted to the S of the whole predicate. Overall arity does not decrease: the promoted possessor fills exactly the slot that the incorporated noun's argument position vacated Satō (2022: §3.3); Nakagawa (2024: 489–490).

The possessed-form noun appearing as an incorporated subject is itself the structural signature of this type and distinguishes it from the natural-force type, where the incorporand is in concept form. A further example shows the possessor-stranding structure in context: Satō's Chitose Appendix (iii) gives ku=ram-u-tuy wa ku=si-y-etu-esikari 'I was startled and grabbed at my own nose' Satō (2022: §3). The first clause incorporates ram ‘heart, mind’ in its possessed form as the subject of u-tuy (RECP-cut, intransitive); the possessor of the heart, the speaker, surfaces as S indexed by ku=. The second clause uses the indirect reflexive si- as the quasi-possessive of the incorporated etu ‘nose’ — a pattern treated in Chapter 85 (The Reflexive-Possessive si- and the yay-/si- Division).

What licenses the stranded possessor is a reflexive interpretation: the possessor must be understood as coreferential with the subject of the predication — that is, the body-part is read as belonging reflexively to whoever occupies S. Satō formalizes this as a reflexive-interpretation rescue that offsets most of the markedness penalty that stranding would otherwise attract Satō (2022: §5); Satō (2016: 87–90).

89.4 Satō's markedness calculus and the systematic gap

Satō ranks all incorporation subtypes by a constraint-and-rescue scoring system, where each restriction adds penalty points and each licensing factor subtracts them Satō (2022: §5); Satō (2016: 88). Penalty values differ between the 2022 Handbook chapter and the 2016 paper (alternative scores in parentheses), but the rank order and frequency proportions are identical.

The Backgrounding rescue applies to natural-force and body-part nouns because their low referential salience makes incorporation semantically unobtrusive. The Reflexive rescue applies only where the stranded possessor is coreferential with the predicate's subject — possible for subject-incorporated body-parts (possessor = experiencer = S) but not for possessed object nouns, because the inflectional possessor i= there makes the noun definite and blocks any reflexive reading Satō (2022: §4–5).

The final row exposes the systematic gap: possessor-requiring object NI is ungrammatical because no available rescue reduces the net penalty sufficiently. The slot is instead filled by quasi-incorporation — Satō's third verb class of idiomatic tight phrasal constructions such as par oyki 'feed' and aske uk 'invite' — treated in Chapter 90 (Oblique Incorporation and the Syntactic-vs-Lexicalist Debate) Satō (2022: §6–7).

89.5 The agentivity restriction

Shibatani observed that Ainu subjects do not incorporate freely: only the patient-subject of an intransitive — not the agent — incorporates, and he proposed that this tracks unaccusativity Shibatani (1988: 210–211); Shibatani (1990: 62). On that account, the incorporable subjects are those that originate as the underlying object of an unaccusative base, while agents of unergative predicates cannot incorporate.

Satō accepts the empirical restriction but rejects unaccusativity as the defining criterion, on the grounds that the natural-force transitive subtype — in which the original A of a transitive predicate incorporates — cannot be captured by the unaccusative account Satō (2008: 226); Satō (2022: §1). The property that covers all subtypes is low degree of agentivity: a noun is incorporable as subject when it denotes a force or body-part acting without volition, intention, or independent agency. Waves, rain, wind, cold, and body-parts all meet this criterion; human or animal agents do not. Unaccusativity then becomes a sufficient condition for incorporability — all unaccusative subjects qualify — but not a necessary one ‹contested›.

The connection to the split-intransitive alignment is direct: the distinction between patient-like and agent-like S arguments is already grammaticalized in Hokkaido Ainu person marking, and the class of incorporable subjects maps onto the patient-like side of that split. The theoretical debate between the unaccusativity account and the low-agentivity account is not settled in the sources surveyed here ‹contested›.

89.6 Natural-force transitive subject NI

The rarest subtype incorporates the subject of a transitive verb. The incorporated noun is always a natural-force concept — wave, rain, snow, wind, light, deity — and must appear in concept form, not possessed form, which is the same morphological criterion that applies in the natural-force intransitive subtype Nakagawa (2024: 489–491); Satō (2022: §3.4).

The structural result is passive-like: the incorporated noun was the A of the transitive base; after incorporation the arity drops by one and the former O surfaces as the new S, taking S person suffixes. The intransitive suffix =an (fourth-person S) on the derived verb is the diagnostic Nakagawa (2024: 489–491).

The attested incorporands for this subtype include kamuy ‘deity’, koy ‘wave’, rir ‘wave, billow’, me ‘cold’, nis ‘cloud’, rera ‘wind’, sukus ‘light’, apto ‘rain’, and upas ‘snow’ Nakagawa (2024: 489–491). All denote ambient natural forces with minimal agentivity. Satō notes that this subtype is "probably impossible in many languages", which makes it one of the more typologically distinctive features of Ainu noun incorporation Satō (2022: §3.4).

89.7 The ko- applicative inside sir- verbs

The zero-argument meteorological predicates built on sir- can host the applicative ko-, which adds a beneficiary or experiencer and promotes it to the verb's sole indexed argument. Forms like sir-ko-kunne 'it darkens for X / night falls for X' and ku=sir-ko-peker 'the weather brightens for me / I experience daybreak' are current in Chitose and Saru Nakagawa (2024: 489).

A community-proposed analysis (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord 2024-12-05) reads ku=sir-ko-peker as follows: the base meteorological verb sirpeker 'the weather brightens' is a closed stem in which sir- is already incorporated; the applicative ko- inserts into this closed stem between the incorporated noun and the root rather than attaching to the outside of the compound. The ko- object — the experiencer — is then promoted to the overall subject, indexed by ku=. Parallel structures proposed in the same discussion include maw-ko-wen 'the mist becomes bad for X' and kur-ko-tunas 'it becomes cold for someone' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹contested›.

A related morphological observation from the same source concerns ordering. The attested form is sir-ko-kunne, not the hypothetical *ko-sir-kunne. This ordering — where the incorporated subject sir- precedes the applicative ko- — is consistent with subject incorporation occupying the pre-applicative, pre-root slot of the verb template, not a position inside the applicative layer, and is proposed as evidence that subject incorporation is structurally distinct from other prefix types aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹contested›. The verb-word template is treated in Chapter 73 (Valency, Voice, and Noun Incorporation: Overview), and the feeding relation between applicatives and incorporation in Chapter 82 (Applicative Stacking, Ordering, and the Feeding of Relativization).