Chapter 91Adverbial (Manner) Incorporation and the Property-Verb Question

91.1 The construction and the -no diagnostic

A verb stem may carry, immediately before its root, a second, non-head verb stem that reads as a manner: pirka-resu ‘raise well’, tomte-resu ‘raise with care’. The mechanism is the one Shibatani sets out for what he calls adverb incorporation: the adverbial suffix -no drops, and the bare stem sits against the verb root, inside the person index Shibatani (1990: 71–72); Nakagawa (2024: 484, 492). The minimal pair on pirka ‘be good, fine’ shows the one-word result:

The person-index test that identifies noun incorporation (§Chapter 88 (Object (Patient) Noun Incorporation)) carries over: an index before the whole stem, not between modifier and root, marks the sequence as a single verb. This chapter takes the manner variety on its own terms, because what fills the modifier slot turns out not to be an adverb.

91.2 What is incorporated is a verb, not an adverb

Ainu has no adjective or adverb class distinct from the verb: property concepts are stative intransitive verbs — pirka ‘be good’, wen ‘be bad’, poro ‘be big’ Tamura (1996); Shibatani (1990: 16–20). The adverb pirka-no is derived from that verb by -no. In the incorporated construction it is the bare verb stem pirka, not the adverb pirka-no, that joins the head — the same -no-drop Shibatani describes. The element inside the word is therefore a verb, and the label "adverb" tracks the English gloss rather than the Ainu category ‹speculative›.

The modifier need not even be intransitive. tomte ‘adorn, make fine’ is a transitive verb (Batchelor's tomtere 'to adorn'), and omap ‘love, cherish’ is transitive, yet both compound before resu ‘raise’ with the same manner reading and the same effect on argument structure — none. A stative pirka and a transitive tomte behave alike here, which is expected of non-head verbs in a compound and not of a lexical adverb ‹speculative›.

Because the modifier adds no participant, the head keeps its frame. pirka-resu stays a two-place transitive: the manner verb's own single argument is identified with the head's subject, in the manner of a depictive secondary predicate, and contributes a relation rather than an argument (arity +0). The valency layer records this as a manner_compound operation that adds an internal, non-surface slot; see Chapter 73 (Valency, Voice, and Noun Incorporation: Overview).

91.3 The resu family and the applicative interaction

The rearing verbs of the Chitose and Saru corpora give the clearest paradigm. Nakagawa lists both compounds as headwords, each analysed as manner + resu: pirka-resu ‘raise well’ from pirka 'good', tomte-resu ‘raise finely’ from tomte 'finely' Nakagawa (1995). Narration routinely runs the two as a couplet:

A single word can stack both manner verbs: pirka-tomte-resu ‘raise well and finely’. Whether it brackets as [[pirka-tomte]-resu] or [pirka-[tomte-resu]] is not settled by the few attested tokens ‹corpus-suggested›.

The manner verbs sit apart from the valency-changing operations, and the two combine on one stem. The instrument applicative e- ‘applicative (instrument)’ promotes the means a child is raised on to a core object, giving a three-place stem eresu '…を〜で育てる':

Applied to the doubled manner stem, the same applicative yields epirkatomteresu, which Yoshikawa's Saru valency list places among the verbs of long-term action and glosses '…を〜で大事に育てる' Yoshikawa (2020):

The split is the point: pirkatomteresu is two-place and epirkatomteresu three-place, and the difference is carried entirely by e-. The manner verbs modify the event; the applicative rearranges the arguments.

91.4 Stacking, co-incorporation, and the pondering chain

A noun and a manner verb may incorporate together. Shibatani cites kiraw-riki-kur-roski 'raise the horns high', with the noun kiraw 'horn' and the element riki 'high, up' both inside one verb Shibatani (1990: 72). Where the modifier is a spatial word with no verbal source, like riki, the adverb analysis may hold; the productive manner class built on property verbs is the part this chapter reanalyses ‹speculative›.

The manner verb also composes below the applicatives in the long pondering verbs. In eyaykotuymasiramsuypa 'ponder deeply about', the core is the noun-incorporation siram-suypa 'sway one's mind'; tuyma ‘be far’ — a stative verb, glossed here 'deeply' — adds a manner over that core (+0), and only then do the applicative ko-, the reflexive yay-, and the applicative e- stack outward Bugaeva (2014). The database keeps tuyma here as the stative verb rather than a separate adverb entry, so the manner reading follows from its non-head position, not from a change of class.

91.5 Typological placement

Incorporation theory is built around the noun. Mithun's four-type developmental scale is a typology of noun incorporation, and its implicational steps concern patients and case, not manner modifiers Mithun (1984); the syntactic (Baker) and lexicalist (Rosen) accounts likewise take N-into-V as the object of study Baker (1988); Rosen (1989); Gerdts (1998). "Adverb incorporation" is named in passing rather than established as a category parallel to noun incorporation ‹contested›.

Read as verb-verb compounding, the Ainu pattern has clearer relatives. A non-head predicate expressing manner or result inside one verbal word is the shape of the Chinese resultative verb compound (养好 'raise-good'); Ainu reverses that order, with the manner verb before the lexical head ‹speculative›. Bound evaluative morphology of the Inuit type — Inuktitut -tsiaq- 'well' — translates alike but differs in kind: the postbase is bound from the lexicon, not a free verb drawn into the word, so Eskimologists treat it as derivation rather than incorporation Compton (2012). Chukchi incorporates degree and quantity stems on a comparable path Kantarovich (2024), and Gunwinyguan verbs admit adverbial as well as nominal incorporation Evans (2003) ‹contested›.

The evaluative counterpart of the manner construction is not compounding at all but the applicative on the property verb: e-pirka 'be good with respect to X' keeps pirka as the head and adds the ground as an argument, the way Japanese 住みよい 'good to live in' makes the property word the head and the verb its ground. Manner pirka-resu does the reverse: the action verb is the head and the property verb the modifier. One asks how the event proceeds, the other whether a participant is suited to an activity, and Ainu marks the split by which element heads the word ‹speculative›.