Chapter 98Predicative Possession: kor, Existential Possession, and isam

98.1 Overview

Hokkaido Ainu encodes predicative possession — 'X has Y' at the clause level — through two verb-based strategies. The dominant one deploys the transitive verb kor ‘have, hold’, which takes the possessor as its subject (A argument) and the possessed entity as its object: kasa ku=kor 'I have an umbrella'. The second strategy, confined to a closed class of affiliative body-part and kinship nouns, places the possessed noun in its affiliative (possessed) form and predicates it with the intransitive existential verb an ‘exist’ (singular) or okay ‘exist (plural)’ (plural): a=yup-i an 'one has an elder brother'. A third pattern, kor wa an, combines possession with the resultative auxiliary to encode stative or resultant possession; it belongs to the intersection of predicative possession and the aspect system treated in Chapter 110 (The Existential-Aspect System: kor an Progressive and wa an Resultative-Perfect).

Adnominal possession — the ku=kor cise genitive-like construction, the affiliative double-marking pattern, and the appositive construction — is covered in Chapter 46 (Adnominal Possession: Double Marking and the Appositive Construction) and Chapter 43 (The Alienable/Inalienable Split and Possessive Classification); the present chapter treats only predicative (clause-final, copula-free) possession constructions. Typologically, the two-strategy system places Hokkaido Ainu in the mixed HAVE/BE category of (Stassen 1997): the HAVE strategy with a dedicated transitive verb covers the great majority of cases, while the BE strategy — here the existential an — is confined to the inalienable domain ‹corpus-suggested›. Huber's corpus study finds that over 80% of predicative possession clauses employ the HAVE-type construction Huber (2025: 254). The pedagogical grammar of Ijäs (2023) likewise introduces kor as the canonical possession verb.

98.2 The HAVE-construction: transitive kor

The verb kor ‘have, hold’ is a two-place transitive verb (2項動詞) with the possessor as its A argument and the possessed entity as its O argument Refsing (1986: 160–161). It takes the standard S/A/O personal-affix paradigm described in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms): the possessor is indexed by the A-series (transitive subject) prefixes, while a third-person possessed noun carries no person index. Refsing analyses kor as an "attributive postposition" when it appears inside a noun phrase (ku=kor cise 'my house') and as a predicative verb when it closes a clause Refsing (1986: 160–161); Nakagawa treats both uses as the same transitive verb Nakagawa (2024: §4.2.2).

One caution on homonymy: kor also functions as the conjunctive particle 'while', marking simultaneous or background events in a clause chain. The two uses are distinguished by their syntactic position — predicative kor is clause-final, conjunctive kor occurs between two verbal clauses — and are treated separately in Chapter 134 (Simultaneous kor 'while' and Overlapping-Event Clauses). The corpus rank-5 frequency of 30,389 tokens for kor folds both functions together ‹corpus-suggested›.

98.3 BE-type: existential possession with affiliative nouns

A second strategy is restricted to nouns that carry an affiliative (possessed) form — primarily body-part and kinship nouns. The possessed noun appears in its affiliative form (root plus suffix -i, -he, -ke, etc.), and the possessor is encoded by the appropriate person prefix on that noun itself. The predicate is then the intransitive existential verb an ‘exist’ (singular) or okay ‘exist (plural)’ (plural), making the literal structure 'one's X exists' Huber (2025: 251–253):

This is the same existential an that appears in bare existential and locational clauses (see Chapter 97 (Existential and Locational Clauses (an / oka))), here pressed into possessive service by the inherent person prefix on the possessed noun itself. Because the possessor is already encoded on the noun, no additional verbal person marking is needed: the construction is entirely intransitive from the verb's perspective. The number suppletion an (sg) / okay~oka (pl) tracks the number of the possessed entity, following the same agreement pattern as in all other existential clauses Nakagawa (2024: 146). The kinship and honorific dimensions of this construction — including which kin terms carry affiliative forms — are developed in Chapter 48 (Kinship and Honorific Possession); the morphophonology of the affiliative suffix itself is in Chapter 45 (Morphophonology of the Affiliative Suffix and Echo/Copy Vowels).

98.4 Stative possession: kor wa an

The periphrasis kor wa an — possessive verb kor + conjunctive wa + existential an — encodes stative or resultant possession: the possessor is in a persisting state of holding something as the result of a prior obtaining event. This pattern is an instance of the wider resultative V wa an construction analysed in Chapter 110 (The Existential-Aspect System: kor an Progressive and wa an Resultative-Perfect); in the possession domain it specifies that a possession relation has been established and continues to hold.

The pattern extends to incorporated nominals, where a body-part or object noun is fused into kor as a compound before the resultative tail:

The same frame with the 4th-person intransitive suffix =an — a=kohon-kor wa an=an 'was pregnant with (lit. hold-belly-have, one-exists)' ILCAA Ainu materials (1976) (川上まつ子, 民話23 [aa-irc/023#74]) — shows noun incorporation, possessive predication, resultative aspect, and 4th-person marking interacting in a single verb complex. The incorporation and valency dimensions are treated in Chapter 89 (Subject Incorporation and Possessor-Stranding).

98.5 Negation of possession

The two possession strategies negate by different means, each recruiting a suppletive lexical negative rather than ordinary clausal negation Bugaeva (2012: 496).

For the HAVE-type, the transitive verb sak ‘lack, be without’ takes the same A/O argument frame as kor: the possessor is the subject and the lacked entity is the object Bugaeva (2012: 496). Ordinary clausal negation somo kor is also possible but less frequent than the suppletive sak Nakagawa (2024: 323) (see Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo)):

For the BE-type, the negative existential isam ‘not exist, be absent’ — the suppletive lexical negative of an/okay — follows directly from the structure: if the possessed noun in affiliative form fails to exist, the possessor lacks it. The possessive reading ('has no X') is thus the automatic negative of 'X exists (as one's possession)'. The full description of isam is in Chapter 127 (Negative Existential and Possessive: isam).

The asymmetry — both possession strategies using suppletive, lexical negatives rather than the plain somo operator — parallels the negation of the copula (ka somo ne) and of the existential (isam) documented in Chapter 100 (TAM, Evidentiality, and Negation on Nonverbal Predicates). The interaction of these negators with TAM, evidential tails, and scope is treated there.

98.6 Division of labour and diachrony

The choice between HAVE-type and BE-type tracks the semantic relationship between possessor and possessed. Alienable possession — objects, tools, animals, goods — takes kor exclusively. Inalienable possession, where the possessed entity (body part or kinship relation) is inherently indexed to a possessor through the affiliative morphology, admits the BE-type construction in addition to kor Huber (2025: 251–254); Refsing (1986: 160–161). The BE-type is further restricted to those inalienable nouns that actually carry an affiliative suffix form (see Chapter 34 (Nominal Subclasses and Obligatorily-Possessed (Bound) Nouns) and Chapter 43 (The Alienable/Inalienable Split and Possessive Classification) for the full taxonomy).

Typologically, this profile maps onto the mixed HAVE/BE type in (Stassen 1997): a language with a dedicated transitive HAVE verb as the default and an existential BE construction for inalienable possession. The inalienable-domain restriction of the BE type is expected under the cross-linguistic generalisation that languages permitting both strategies tend to use the existential for possession relations that are encoded also in the morphology of the possessed noun itself ‹consensus›.

A diachronic note: an early modern source (もしほ草, ca. 1806) records possessive expressions where kor is absent and the possessor is instead encoded by a person prefix on an existential verb — ci=oro okay kotan 'our village' (lit. 'our-in existing village'), ci=okay cas 'our castle' — suggesting that kor had not yet grammaticalized as the dominant possessive predicate in that textual register. This may reflect an earlier stage in which various existential strategies were available before kor extended its possessive scope aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord 2024-11-23) ‹speculative›. The current dominance of kor (>80% of predicative possession in Huber's data Huber (2025: 254)) would then represent the outcome of that grammaticalization trajectory, though the textual evidence is thin and the comparison of registers is uncontrolled.