Chapter 127Negative Existential and Possessive: isam

127.1 Place in the negation system

Hokkaido Ainu negates existence and possession with verbs whose meaning already contains the negation, leaving the preverbal adverb somo absent. The negative existential is isam ‘not exist, be gone’, the lexical counterpart of the positive existentials an ‘exist, be located’ (singular) and oka(y) (plural); the privative sak ‘lack, be without’ is the lexical counterpart of kor ‘have’ Bugaeva (2012: 496); Nakagawa (2024: 450). Because the negative resides in the verb, the predicate indexes its arguments in the ordinary way and no adverbial negator is added. The standard somo strategy is treated in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo), the positive existential and locational predicates in Chapter 97 (Existential and Locational Clauses (an / oka)), and predicative possession with kor in Chapter 98 (Predicative Possession: kor, Existential Possession, and isam).

isam and sak belong to a wider class of lexical negatives that also includes eaykap ‘cannot’, eramiskari ‘never, not know by experience’, and erampewtek ‘not understand’, all of which carry negative polarity as part of their lexical content Bugaeva (2012: 496); Nakagawa (2024: 314–315). The ability and cognition members of that class are treated in Chapter 128 (Negative Predicates of Ability and Cognition); the present chapter takes the existential and possessive members. Ijäs groups the same items as ‘lexically negated verbs’, pairing an/oka with isam and kor with sak Ijäs (2023).

127.2 The negative existential isam

isam is a one-place intransitive verb. It takes the entity whose absence is asserted as its sole argument and indexes it with the ordinary intransitive person set — ku=isam ‘I am gone/absent’, e=isam ‘you are gone’ — while a third-person subject is zero-marked. Dal Corso notes that isam is the only intransitive member of the lexical-negative class Dal Corso (2025: 41). Its single argument slot serves as a constituency diagnostic: a clause containing two independent noun phrases cannot be a simple isam predication, since the verb supplies only one position Nakagawa (2024). The Handbook flags one isam clause whose lack of an overt personal affix it finds unexpected, against the normal pattern in which the verb does index its subject Bugaeva (2022).

isam licenses the same ka-indefinite polarity items that occur under somo: nep ka ‘anything’ reads ‘nothing’ in its scope, and the additive ka may be repeated across several indefinites for an exhaustive ‘nothing at all’ Nakagawa (2024: 323). The indefinite series and the scope of negation over it are set out in Chapter 129 (Negative-Polarity Indefinites and the Scope of Negation).

Two values of isam should be kept apart. The existential value ‘there is none’ denies presence in a place or discourse domain; the change-of-state value ‘be gone’ presents absence as the result of a disappearance, and extends to a person’s death or absence Bugaeva (2012: 496). The second value survives in the auxiliary wa isam, where a verb phrase linked by wa leads to a state in which the relevant participant or result has disappeared, the source of renderings such as ‘V away’ or ‘end up gone’ Nakagawa (2024: 450). Its aspectual placement among the wa-auxiliaries is taken up in Chapter 113 (Phasal, Iterative, and Habitual Aspect).

127.3 isam and the somo strategy

The lexical isam does not displace the positive existential an/oka. An existential or locational predicate may still be negated analytically by placing somo before an, as with any verbal predicate Nakagawa (2024: 365–366); Satō (2008: 124). The sources consulted agree that isam is the lexical negative of the existential, but they do not quantify when a speaker selects lexical isam over analytic somo an.

Ijäs proposes a semantic division: isam denotes complete absence or disappearance, while somo an is used where an keeps its broader value ‘live, be located’, and can additionally mark an absurd or impossible existence Ijäs (2023). The division is plausible, since an independently covers existence, location, and residence and positive predicates are negatable by somo; the precise split is her pedagogical formulation and is not stated in those terms by Nakagawa, Satō, or Bugaeva ‹speculative›. The somo an side of the contrast is treated in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo).

The same caution applies to the blocking rule. Ijäs presents isam and sak as the normal negatives wherever such a paired verb exists, so that somo plus the positive counterpart is ‘not usually possible’ Ijäs (2023). Dal Corso reports southern Hokkaido somo kor ‘not have’ beside sak, with a pragmatic difference supplied by Nakagawa Dal Corso (2025: 41 n.1), and Bugaeva characterizes these verbs only as containing negation in their meaning, not as barring somo Bugaeva (2012: 496). The evidence supports a lexical preference; a categorical ban overstates the distribution ‹contested›.

127.4 Possessive negation: sak

Possessive negation is distributed over two related constructions. Where the missing entity is profiled as absent from a possessor’s sphere, an existential isam clause expresses ‘there is no X (for Y)’. Where the possessor is the subject of a privative predicate, the verb is sak. Bugaeva identifies sak as the lexical negative of kor ‘have’ Bugaeva (2012: 496), and Ijäs gives the same pair Ijäs (2023). For positive predicative possession and the nominal affiliative alternatives to kor, see Chapter 98 (Predicative Possession: kor, Existential Possession, and isam) and the possessed form.

sak is transitive: the possessor is its subject and the lacked thing its object, so a nominalized ona sak pe is ‘father-lack NMLZ’, hence ‘one who has no father’, with the lacked kin term as the complement of sak Bugaeva (2012: 496). The privative base also enters lexical compounds, such as the tabooed snake-name sak-somo-ay-ep recorded by Nakagawa Nakagawa (2024).

The no of the constructed example reflects a general linkage pattern: negative and negative-meaning predicates favour the stative adverbial linker no over successive wa. Takahashi gives Tokachi evidence that negated subordinate clauses select no, and Nakagawa states the rule for stative, negative-meaning, or overtly negated verb phrases Takahashi (2016: 75–77); Nakagawa (2024: 340). Ijäs extends the observation to lexical negatives such as sak and isam Ijäs (2023). The symmetric/asymmetric typology behind the no-only restriction is set out in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo).

127.5 Diachrony: *sam and the negative-existential cycle

Dal Corso’s comparative account of Ainu negation is anchored in a Sakhalin study but makes a specific Hokkaido-facing proposal. He reconstructs a negative-existential root *sam and analyses Hokkaido isam as the antipassive prefix i- on that transitive root, with antipassivization yielding the intransitive ‘not exist’; the standard negator somo is derived in the same account from *samno through final stress and an a/o change Dal Corso (2025: 41–42). On this reconstruction a single source *sam underlies both the surviving negative existential isam and the general clausal negator somo. The read Hokkaido reference grammars present no such etymology, so the shared-root analysis is a diachronic hypothesis rather than a synchronic fact about Hokkaido clauses ‹speculative›.

Ijäs independently reaches essentially the same segmentation, i- plus a lost transitive sam* ‘something is not located’, and explicitly labels it speculation Ijäs (2023). The convergence of her lesson note with Dal Corso’s philological argument raises the point from an isolated pedagogical guess to a live scholarly proposal. It remains a proposal: for ordinary clause grammar isam behaves as a single intransitive negative existential, with no productive alternation involving a free sam root ‹speculative›.

The reconstruction situates Ainu within two diachronic models that Dal Corso applies to it: the Givón negative cycle, by which a negator is periodically renewed, and the Negative Existential Cycle, by which a negative existential predicate develops into a general clausal negator and may leave existential traces in the result (Givón 1978); (Croft 1991); Dal Corso (2025: 41–42). The cycle would explain why a negative existential and a standard negator are diachronically connected in one account while occupying distinct synchronic constructions. Its application to Hokkaido is a historical hypothesis, not a synchronic generalization ‹speculative›: in the present-day grammar isam is a verb, and somo the preverbal negative adverb of Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo).