Chapter 139Reference Tracking and Argument Continuity

139.1 Overview

Reference tracking in Hokkaido Ainu discourse rests on a cluster of mechanisms that work in concert: obligatory verbal person indices, pervasive zero anaphora, the referential properties of the fourth-person form-set, the lexical class of location nouns, and constructional signals of topic continuity and scene transition. There is no morphological switch-reference system. The bound person indices do not encode same-subject versus different-subject across clause junctions, and the clause-linking particles carry no built-in reference-change signal; participant continuity is inferred from index identity and from discourse structure, not marked by a dedicated morpheme Bugaeva (2022); Satō (2025: 359–371).

The formal person paradigm, the S/A/O sets, and the fourth-person cell are treated in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms); the semantics of the fourth-person form-set in Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing) and Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person); clause-chaining and the wa/hine relationship in Chapter 132 (Sequential wa and Clause Chaining); topicalization and anakne in Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka); logophoric narration and reported speech in Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse).

139.2 Zero anaphora

Because every finite verb obligatorily indexes its arguments through bound person markers, an overt NP is an optional supplement to the cross-reference already present on the verb. An NP recoverable from context is simply absent, with no pronoun in its place: "it is not necessary in Ainu for a noun phrase that is clear from the context to appear in a sentence, and such a noun phrase is not even represented by a pronoun" Nakagawa (2024: 361); Bugaeva (2022). The result is that participant continuity across a narrative is maintained principally through the identity of the person indices across successive verbs, not through a chain of co-referring pronouns.

Even when the person indices cannot identify an argument — specifically, when a three-place (ditransitive) verb's two-affix cap leaves the theme unindexed — the verb's valency guarantees the anaphoric reading without any overt NP or pronoun. The theme of kore 'give' is zero in the following pair of sentences; its reference to the sweet just mentioned is resolved by the verb's own argument-structure requirement Satō (2025: 368–369):

Overt NP mention is reserved for participant (re)introduction, contrast, or a shift in discourse topic. When an NP does appear alongside a person index, it stands in an appositional relation to that index: the index constitutes the argument; the NP specifies or highlights it Satō (2025: 363–365); Bugaeva (2012: 472). The NP's position within the preverbal field is set by pragmatic prominence; argument realization and appositional NPs are treated in Chapter 93 (Argument Realization: Affix Indexing and Free NP Order) and Chapter 142 (Pragmatic Word-Order Permutation, Dislocation, and Argument Ellipsis).

139.3 The fourth person in reference tracking

The fourth-person form-set — intransitive subject suffix =an, transitive subject prefix a= (dialectally an= in Tokachi and Ishikari), and object prefix i= — does substantial reference-tracking work in oral narrative genres. Its functions in this domain fall into two related types: narrating the story-world protagonist's actions (narrative first person), and marking the reported speaker's first person inside a quotation (logophoric use). Both are documented principally for Saru and Chitose Nakagawa (2024: 174–179); Bugaeva (2008: 40–43).

139.4 The location noun class as role disambiguator

When two third-person participants share the same zero marking, the lexical class of location nouns provides a means of role assignment. Nouns designating places or spatial relations — or 'inside/place', ka 'above', sam 'near', corpok 'below', and others — are semantically constrained to the Location argument of a predicate. When one participant is or includes a location noun, it is unambiguously the Location role, and the other must be theme or patient. Role is resolved without case marking or fixed word order Nakagawa (2022); Bugaeva (2022).

The attested test case from Nakagawa's Handbook chapter is the contrast between saranip or oma-re 'put into the basket' (where or flags the goal) and the ambiguous saranip oma-re without it, where the basket could be either theme or goal Nakagawa (2022). Bugaeva takes the location class as evidence that argumenthood is shared between the bound person index and the coreferential NP, since only a semantically contrastive NP can bear this tracking weight Bugaeva (2022).

The mechanism is a lexical resource, not a grammatical one: it operates only when one of the participants is a location noun, which leaves the common case of two ordinary-noun third-person arguments to plausibility and discourse context Nakagawa (2024: 363). Its full treatment is in Chapter 92 (Basic Constituent Order and Head-Final Syntax) and Chapter 94 (Pro-Drop, (Non)configurationality, and the Pronominal-Argument Debate).

139.5 Topic marking and participant tracking

A referent that is being introduced as the topic of a sustained passage, or that re-enters discourse salience after an interval, is often fronted and marked by the adverbial particle anak(ne). The particle functions comparably to Japanese は in establishing a topic for the clauses that follow, but it is used more sparingly — it carries the weight of "as for (X), specifically" rather than neutral givenness marking, and it is not re-applied clause by clause to a topic already active in the discourse Nakagawa (2024: 364); Shibatani (1990: 38–39). Community practice corroborates this: an established topic does not need to be re-marked; omitting anakne when the referent is clear from context is normal (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-09, asserted; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

The attested corpus contains topicalized possessed-subject NPs of precisely this type. In an uwepeker narrated by Kawakami Matsuko, the sentence a=kor seta anakne i=oyakke oma ka somo ki p ne kusu i=sam ta ukasuy ipe=an — 'my dog, as for it, never left my side, so it ate (together) with me' — introduces the dog as topic with anakne and then tracks it by zero anaphora and person indices through the remainder of the episode ILCAA Ainu materials (1976) (Kawakami Matsuko, AA研アイヌ語資料, Saru [aa-irc/009#393]).

The full syntax of anak(ne), including its scope, its interaction with focus particles, and its distributional limits, is treated in Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka) and Chapter 141 (Cleft, Pseudocleft, and Nominalization-Based Focus).

139.6 Scene transition in narrative

Participant continuity within a narrative episode is sustained by clause-chaining with wa and hine: where person indices remain constant across chained clauses, a single participant is tracked through a sustained sequence. The statistical tendency of wa toward same-subject reference — approximately 90% of wa-chained clauses in Refsing's Shizunai data share their subject Refsing (1986) — reflects a discourse-structural preference rather than a grammatical constraint; different-subject sequences with wa are attested ‹corpus-suggested›. See Chapter 132 (Sequential wa and Clause Chaining).

Episode and actor changes are marked by the construction a p / a korka, comprising the perfective auxiliary a followed by the nominalizer p or the adversative particle korka. Bugaeva describes this construction as marking "the point at which the scene, topic, or actor in the story changes," typically followed by the orienting adverb tane 'now' Bugaeva (2022). The mechanism operates at the narrative-structural level, above the clause-linkage system, and is developed in Chapter 138 (Tail-Head Linkage and Narrative Clause Cohesion).

139.7 The absence of morphological switch-reference

Ainu has no morphological switch-reference system Bugaeva (2022); Satō (2025: 371). In switch-reference languages, a clause-linking morpheme encodes whether the subject of the dependent clause is the same as or different from the subject of an adjacent clause. No such morpheme exists in Ainu. The clause-linking particles wa, hine, kor, and kane are linkers between finite clauses, not non-finite subordinators with an obligatory co-reference specification; and the language has no converbs — non-finite verbal forms that typically carry switch-reference morphology — in the relevant typological sense Bugaeva (2022); Refsing (1986).

The functions that switch-reference systems serve elsewhere are distributed across the cluster of mechanisms described in this chapter: the obligatory person indices identify participants at each verb; zero anaphora propagates known referents; the fourth-person form signals the story-internal perspective and the logophoric reported-speaker; the location noun class resolves two zero-marked third-person roles; topic-fronting with anak(ne) re-establishes prominence; and the a p construction flags episode boundaries. None of these constitutes switch-reference in the typological sense, and the differences matter for comparing Ainu with its geographically adjacent languages ‹consensus›.

Ijäs correctly describes Ainu reference tracking as a discourse-pragmatic matter without positing a switch-reference system, noting the topic particle and the person-form contrast without conflating them with morphological switch-reference Ijäs (2023). The formal typological comparison is available in Chapter 133 (The hine/akusu Contrast and Switch-Reference-Like Linkage).