Chapter 129Negative-Polarity Indefinites and the Scope of Negation

129.1 The interrogative-based indefinite series

Hokkaido Ainu builds its principal indefinite series by adding the additive focus particle ka to an interrogative pro-form: nep ‘what’, nen ‘who’, hunak / ney ‘where’, and hempara ‘when’. Outside the scope of negation the resulting forms are existential — nep ka ‘something, anything’, nen ka ‘someone, anyone’; within the scope of a negative predicate the same forms are read ‘nothing’ and ‘no one’ Nakagawa (2024: 323). The two readings are values of a single form, fixed by the polarity of the clause that contains it.

The series is of the cross-linguistically common type whose members derive from interrogatives and spread across a graded set of functions — specific and non-specific existential, question, conditional, and negation (Haspelmath 1997). In Ainu the negation function is morphologically continuous with the existential one: there is no separate negative pronoun, and the ‘nothing’ / ‘no one’ reading arises only when the existential indefinite falls under a negator. The affirmative existential use is attested for all four bases Nakagawa (2024: 323) and is especially frequent in interrogative and inferential frames, where nen ka introduces a non-specific ‘someone’:

The morphology of the bases and the wider set of interrogative-derived forms belong with Chapter 51 (Interrogative, Indefinite, and Negative-Polarity Pro-forms); the particle ka as additive and scalar focus belongs with Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka). The question pursued here is how these forms are licensed under negation, and where the licensing negation takes scope. The standard negator itself is described in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo).

129.2 The licensing predicates

Any negative predicate in the clause licenses the indefinite series. Three licensers recur: standard somo negation, whether preverbal somo V or the periphrasis V (ka) somo ki with the formal verb ki ‘do’; the negative existential isam ‘not exist’; and the negative ability verb eaykap ‘cannot’. In the periphrasis the notional predicate and its complement stand before somo ki, and the polarity item falls inside the complement that somo negates Bugaeva (2012: 496); Nakagawa (2024: 374, 407).

Preverbal somo licenses the same series. In the topical dictionary nep ka ‘anything’ falls under somo in a polar question:

The negative existential isam licenses the series without somo; its privative and possessive uses are treated in Chapter 127 (Negative Existential and Possessive: isam). With nen ka the result is ‘no one’, the negative counterpart of the existential ‘someone’ in (1):

The negative ability verb eaykap — one of the lexical negatives treated in Chapter 128 (Negative Predicates of Ability and Cognition) — licenses the series in the same way, here on both the body-part object and the notional predicate:

The dialectal negators that replace somo in the same structural slot license the same forms. Nakagawa's eastern-Hidaka example uses henne, and his Shiranuka example the dialectal negator omo with the focus variant kay for ka Nakagawa (2024: 407–408).

The generalization across these licensers is a scope condition, not a property of the indefinite itself: a clause contains one negative predicate, and the interrogative-plus-ka phrase receives a negative interpretation when it falls within that predicate's scope ‹consensus›. The system therefore has no negative pronouns of the English nothing kind, which carry their own negation and can negate a clause unaided; the Ainu forms are read negatively only in concert with an overt negator ‹corpus-suggested›.

129.3 The particle ka: indefinite-formation and focus

The particle ka does two jobs in these clauses. It builds the indefinite (nep ka ‘anything’), and it focuses the constituent that is negated (… ka somo ki, … ka somo ne). The two often co-occur, so that a single clause carries ka twice, once on the indefinite and once on the focused predicate:

Whether ka is present or absent carries no meaning of its own; negative clauses simply favour it, because focusing the constituent whose absence is asserted sharpens the denial Nakagawa (2024: 323, 407). Three analyses of this ka compete. Satō isolates a distinct ‘negative particle’ ka, left untranslated in his paradigms, while granting that it is hard to separate strictly from the ordinary additive particle Satō (2008: 124–125). Nakagawa and Bugaeva keep it continuous with additive and scalar focus ‘also, even, at all’, the latter adding, after Tamura, a nuance of unexpectedness Nakagawa (2024: 323, 407); Bugaeva (2012: 496). Ijäs presents the longer construction as emphatic and broadly exchangeable with plain somo, glossing ka ‘also, even, at all’ Ijäs (2023). The disagreement is over how many homophonous particles to recognize for a single surface form ‹contested›.

The copular negation NP (ka) somo ne uses the same focus particle with the copula ne as its host, and Ijäs treats ka somo ne as the more emphatic way of saying ‘A is not B’ Satō (2008: 22); Ijäs (2023):

129.4 Scalar minimizers and exhaustive negation

A small set of scalar items reinforces the negative reading by naming the low endpoint of the relevant scale. Numeral-based sinep ka ‘even one’ gives ‘not even one’ under a negator; oar ‘completely’ sharpens absence to ‘absolutely none’; poka and ponno ka add a minimal-degree ‘even a little’ Nakagawa (2024: 323, 407). None of these changes the formal licenser; the scalar additive poka under preverbal somo is illustrated in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo).

Exhaustive negation over a list is built by repeating the negated predicate, not by a dedicated quantifier. Nakagawa's clause denies each member of the series in turn:

The Handbook restates the same pattern with the coordinated somo ipe somo wakka ku no an ‘neither eating nor drinking’, after Takahashi's analysis of negated subordinate clauses Bugaeva (2022); Takahashi (2016: 75). Constructed teaching examples in Ijäs use the same scalar logic, placing oar under somo for ‘completely not, absolutely not’; these illustrate an attested pattern but are not corpus evidence Ijäs (2023). A dedicated free-choice paradigm — a distinct ‘anything whatever’ or ‘whoever’ series set apart from the existential one — is not described in the sources consulted; the scalar minimizers carry the ‘even the least’ load that free-choice items carry elsewhere ‹speculative›.

129.5 The scope of negation

The licensing condition is a scope condition: the indefinite is interpreted within the scope of the negative predicate of its clause, and the negator's scope is the whole verb phrase that contains the indefinite Nakagawa (2024: 323) ‹corpus-suggested›. The clearest scope evidence comes from the interaction with the nominalization-plus-copula evidential. A clause closed by a formal noun plus ne is negated by negating the verb phrase inside the nominalization; the negator and the indefinite it licenses sit in the embedded proposition, and the evidential frame stays outside the negation Nakagawa (2024: 393).

The mirror-image order locates the boundary. With ruwe somo ne the negator falls on the copula of the formal-noun predicate, and the clause is no longer plain propositional negation but a rhetorical or convictional assertion, close to ‘was it not the case that …?’ Nakagawa (2024: 393). This high-scope copular negation does not license the indefinite series; the polarity items nep ka and sinep ka are licensed only in the lower, negated proposition. The evidential's own negation belongs with the nonverbal-predicate apparatus of Chapter 100 (TAM, Evidentiality, and Negation on Nonverbal Predicates), and the inferential frame itself with Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential).

Within the embedded proposition the placement of somo can in principle leave the scope underdetermined — whether it negates the notional verb or only the existential that hosts the evidential — and Dal Corso's evidentiality study reports both readings for the relevant configurations Dal Corso (2018: 128). The read Hokkaido grammars describe the scope facts but settle no constituency analysis that would adjudicate such ambiguities ‹contested›.

129.6 Boundaries and open questions

The sources settle the basic pattern: interrogative-plus-ka forms are existential outside negation and negative within it, and they are licensed alike by standard somo, by dialectal negators such as henne and omo, and by lexical negatives such as isam and eaykap ‹consensus›. They do not provide a quantified corpus study of the individual indefinite types, or a formal account of the scope ambiguities in evidential and nominalized clauses; the corpus tools available here count lemmas, not the multi-word [interrogative] ka … somo configurations, so no per-construction frequency is asserted ‹corpus-suggested›. Dal Corso (2025: 41)

The remaining analytic boundary is with ordinary focus. Because the same ka marks addition, scalar focus, and the indefinite series, a single negative clause routinely shows the particle twice — once forming an indefinite, once focusing the negated predicate — and the grammars agree on the surface distribution while disagreeing on how many particles to posit ‹contested›. The general account of the particle, including its positive uses, is the necessary counterpart, given with the focus and additive particle.