Chapter 46Adnominal Possession: Double Marking and the Appositive Construction

46.1 The two possessive constructions

Hokkaido Ainu encodes adnominal possession without a genitive case particle or possessive adposition. Two constructions divide the nominal lexicon by alienability. Inalienable nouns — body parts, kinship terms, and a defined range of relational objects — carry a personal possessive prefix and an affiliative suffix directly on the possessed noun: ku=tek-ehe 'my hand'. Alienable nouns — tools, animals, places — are possessed via the transitive verb kor ‘have, hold’, which takes the possessor as its A-argument: ku=kor seta 'my dog'. The choice of construction is fixed by the noun class, not by the speaker's construal of ownership in a given context Nakagawa (2024: 218); Bugaeva (2021: 47) ‹consensus›.

The morphophonology of the affiliative suffix is treated in Chapter 45 (Morphophonology of the Affiliative Suffix and Echo/Copy Vowels); the concept/affiliative functional distinction in Chapter 44 (Concept Form vs. Affiliative (Possessed) Form); the bound-noun status of obligatorily-possessed nouns in Chapter 34 (Nominal Subclasses and Obligatorily-Possessed (Bound) Nouns); kinship terms and their irregular affiliative forms in Chapter 48 (Kinship and Honorific Possession); predicative possession in Chapter 98 (Predicative Possession: kor, Existential Possession, and isam). The present chapter addresses the NP-internal structure: the personal-prefix paradigm, the configuration in which both an overt possessor NP and a head-marked possessum appear together, nested possession, and the appositive kor construction.

46.2 Personal possessive prefixes on inalienable nouns

The possessive prefix on an inalienable noun is the same form set as the transitive-subject (A) prefix documented in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms). On a noun, the prefix indexes the possessor as the "subject" of the possessive relation — the same morphological slot that marks the agent of a transitive verb Satō (2008: 150); Nakagawa (2024: 215–216). Satō notes the "backwards" feel: e=paro 'your mouth' is literally 'you-SUBJ mouth', the possessor marked by what looks like a nominative subject affix Satō (2008: 150).

Accent shift and allomorphy follow the same rules as on verbs. The prefixes ku= and e= move the pitch accent to the syllable immediately after the prefix: ku=sápa, e=páro. The prefixes eci= and a= do not shift the accent: a=sapá, eci=sapá. Before a vowel-initial stem, ku= reduces to k= and ci= to c=, with the accent on the first stem vowel: k=ótop-i Satō (2008: 154).

Each inalienable noun has two affiliative shapes: a short form (the base with the minimal vowel-copy suffix) and a long form (short + -hV₁). The two carry no semantic difference; the choice is prosodically conditioned and for many nouns is simply lexically inherited Nakagawa (2024: 219); Satō (2008: 152–153). In the paradigm above, parenthesised endings mark the optional long-form extension: teke(he), sapa(ha), otopi(hi).

The prefix-plus-affiliative complex is what Satō calls the personal form (人称形 in his account): a noun form that presupposes and indexes a possessor Satō (2008: 155). A third-person personal form such as sik-ihi is referentially complete on its own — 'his/her/their eye(s)' — because the affiliative suffix alone signals the existence of a possessor in discourse context; the possessor NP can be omitted without ambiguity Bugaeva (2021: 52, 80–81). The same paradigm is presented in the Ijäs (2023) learner grammar under the label "possessive prefixes", with the A-set identity made explicit for learners Ijäs (2023).

A minimal illustration of the 2SG prefix in the possessed-noun slot: the noun haw ‘voice’ has the affiliative hawe ‘voice-POSS’ (haw-e, type ②). In iteki [[e=haw-e] aste] — proposed as 'don't raise your voice' — e=haw-e is parsed as the 2SG-possessed noun 'your voice' serving as the object of aste ‘raise’ ‹contested› aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2025-12-03, proposed parse; the affiliative haw-e is independently attested as a plain possessed noun at Nakagawa (2024: 258)).

46.3 Overt possessor NPs and the double-marking configuration

When the possessor is expressed as an overt noun phrase it is juxtaposed immediately before the possessed noun. Ainu has no genitive case suffix or possessive adposition to mark the possessor constituent Nakagawa (2024: 217–218). The result is a configuration in which the possessum bears both the person prefix and the affiliative suffix — the morphological load is carried entirely by the head noun — while the possessor NP is present but structurally unmatched. This is head-marking in the sense of (Nichols 1986): the head of the NP, not the dependent, bears the relational morphology.

The following table summarises the semantic classes of nouns whose grammatical class requires the affiliative construction, following Nakagawa (2024: 219–221):

Class membership is grammatical rather than purely semantic. The same object can fall into either class depending on cultural construal: a regular bow (ku) is typically alienable and takes kor, but a trap-bow is affiliative (kuwehe) because Ainu cosmology treats the prey's choice of whose bow to fall to as inalienable — yet the same trap-bow can also be expressed with kor when framed as an ordinary transferable object Nakagawa (2024: 229) ‹contested›. Whether the triggering condition for affiliative marking is the specificity of the possessor or the grammatical demands of the construction (a person prefix or relative-clause structure) is itself a live debate: the older analysis requires a specific referential possessor (Tamura 2000), while Nakagawa 2024: 227–233 argues the constraint is structural — the affiliative appears wherever a person prefix or relative-clause configuration demands it, regardless of possessor specificity ‹contested›.

The possessor NP and the possessed personal form are not tightly bracketed as a constituent. Satō documents cases in which the possessor NP and the possessed noun are separated by topic particles or other intervening material, with the personal form functioning as a signal that a possessor NP exists somewhere in the discourse context rather than as part of a closely-bound syntactic constituent Satō (2008: 155–156). Bugaeva's parallel formulation is that the possessed suffix "registers a possessor but does not index its properties", so the overt possessor NP can be omitted without loss of grammaticality Bugaeva (2021: 52, 80–81).

Community discussion in the aynu-corpora Discord (thegodofneet, 2025-09-17; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) proposes that the companion/group noun utar ‘family, kin, companions’ has an affiliative form utari(hi) — 'someone's companions/kin' — on the grounds that a group of companions is hard to conceive without a relational anchor, making it pragmatically obligatorily possessed like body-part and kin terms. This is consistent with Nakagawa 2024: 251–252 on the behaviour of utar in narrative ‹contested›.

46.4 Nested possession

When the possessor is itself a personal form — an inalienable noun bearing its own person prefix and affiliative suffix — the result is a chain of possessed nouns, each indexed for its own possessor. The innermost noun carries an overt person prefix; the next noun takes the innermost noun's referent as its possessor, which is then marked by a zero third-person prefix. Nakagawa 2024: 224 (ex. 259) illustrates this in a Saru narrative passage: Nakagawa (2024: 223–224)

Each noun in the chain takes its own personal prefix, and the chain as a whole is not syntactically tight: topic particles can interrupt it, as with the simpler two-noun case above. Possessor-raising through noun incorporation — where the possessor of an incorporated body-part noun is promoted to the clause subject position — is a related but distinct phenomenon treated in Chapter 89 (Subject Incorporation and Possessor-Stranding).

46.5 The kor appositive construction

Alienable nouns cannot receive the person prefix and affiliative suffix directly. The transitive verb kor ‘have, hold, carry’ intervenes between possessor and possessum: the possessor fills the A-slot of kor as a person prefix; the possessed noun follows as the implicit relativised object, remaining in the concept (uninflected) form Nakagawa (2024: 218); Satō (2008: 151).

Bugaeva's analysis, based on the Pacific-wide typology of appositive possession, treats the kor construction as a finite relative clause headed by the transitive verb kor, with the possessum as the gapped object: [__ ku=kor] seta = 'the dog that I have' Bugaeva (2021: 55). Evidence that kor retains full verbal syntax includes the availability of perfective marking (a=kor a kotan 'my former village'), plural suffixes, mirativity, and free stacking of relative clauses over the same head Bugaeva (2021: 57–58). The construction is therefore classified as an appositive-verbal classifier — a Circum-Pacific possessive type in which a finite verb serves as the possessive head rather than a case affix Bugaeva (2021: 52, 80–82).

With a third-person possessor, kor loses its overt A-prefix and can lean phonologically onto the following head noun, yielding units such as kor-ninkari 'X's earrings'. Bugaeva (2021) reads this as an in-progress shift from the dependent-marking pattern of the full verbal construction toward a head-marking configuration in which kor has become a dependent marker on the possessed noun Bugaeva (2021: 59) ‹corpus-suggested›. This trajectory — verbal appositive classifier to head-marking dependent — parallels the path already completed in the inalienable system, where the affiliative suffix now sits squarely on the head.

The set of nouns attested in the kor construction is limited. Tamura's Saru lexicon lists approximately fifty-seven such nouns, distributed across people (24), places and environment (11), food and drink (7), tools and ritual objects (7), domestic animals (1), and human attributes (7); wild animals and plants, owned by no one in the Ainu world, are largely absent Bugaeva (2021: 55–56); (Tamura 1996). The affective extension of kor — as in a=kor pon menoko 'my (dear) young girl' — adds a further function in oral literature beyond straightforward ownership Bugaeva (2021: 56).

Typologically, the inalienable affiliative construction is head-marking in the sense of (Nichols 1986): the relational morphology (person prefix plus affiliative suffix) is borne entirely by the head noun, with no case or adposition marking the possessor dependent. The kor construction differs in placing the possessor index on the intervening verb rather than on the possessed noun head, a configuration that Huber (2025) places in a separate appositive-verbal column within her four-way attributive typology (head-marking / dependent-marking / zero-marking / double-marking) Huber (2025: 248). The broader Circum-Pacific context and its diachronic implications are laid out in Bugaeva (2021: 80–82). Noun incorporation of possessed body-part nouns and the interaction with the kor set (alienable nouns cannot be incorporated in their possessed forms) are treated in Chapter 88 (Object (Patient) Noun Incorporation).