Chapter 141Cleft, Pseudocleft, and Nominalization-Based Focus

141.1 Overview

Hokkaido Ainu has no morphological focus affix and no dedicated cleft particle. The work of marking focus, asserting propositions, and identifying referents falls to the same nominalization-plus-copula architecture that underlies the evidential system. A finite clause is nominalized by a light formal noun — p/pe, hi, or one of the four evidential heads ruwe, hawe, siri, humi — and the result is predicated with the copula ne Nakagawa (2024: 390–392, 503–509); Satō (2008: 134–135, 174–180). The copula predicates the nominalized proposition as an asserted or identified fact, and the choice of formal noun and of the post-nominal predicate (ne, an, or bare) encodes illocutionary force — declarative, content question, or polar question (§5 below).

This chapter treats the information-structural function of three overlapping constructions: (a) the p/pe and hi nominalization cleft, which throws assertive or identificational focus onto a participant or proposition; (b) the naming cleft sekor a=ye p/hawe/katu ne, which identifies or labels a referent; and (c) the evidential frame as an assertion-focus device, with cross-references to the evidential chapters. Focus particles (patek ‘only’, ka ‘also, even’) and the kakari-musubi emphatic concord are surveyed in §7 with a pointer to Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka), where their full treatment appears. The structural mechanics of p/hi as nominalizers are in Chapter 101 (The Nominalizers -p/-pe and -i/-hi (Participant, Event, Place, Fact)) and Chapter 35 (The Formal / Defective Noun Set (ruwe, hawe, siri, humi, hi, pe, kur)); the copula is treated in Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses).

141.2 The p/pe and hi nominalization cleft

The minimal frame is a person-marked VP followed by the nominalizer p ‘thing, one, fact (nominalizer)’ (after a vowel) or pe ‘thing, one, fact (nominalizer)’ (after a consonant), and then the copula ne ‘be, copula’. The nominalizer has the arity of a formal noun (−1 on Nakagawa's arity scale), so it saturates a gap left by one participant in the embedded clause — producing a relative-clause reading ('the one who …', 'the thing that …') — or nominalizes a whole saturated clause — producing a complement reading ('the fact that …') Nakagawa (2024: 261, 503–509); Satō (2008: 174–180). When the result is predicated with ne, the copular sentence frames the nominalized content as an assertable fact and throws focus onto either the predicate nominal or the proposition as a whole Satō (2008: 174–177).

Ijäs's lesson on adnominal clauses presents the same pre-head gap strategy without treating the copular focus function explicitly (Ijäs 2023). The arity principle that distinguishes relative-clause from complement uses is stated precisely only in Nakagawa (2024: 503–507) and Satō (2008: 174–175), and is the lens through which the focus function is understood here.

141.3 The naming cleft: sekor a=ye … ne

The naming cleft identifies a referent by the name or label applied to it. Its standard formula is [label] sekor a=ye [formal-noun] ne, 'the [word/fact] of calling [something] [label] is'. The quotative complementizer sekor ‘quotative’ introduces the quoted name (see Chapter 105 (Quotative Complementation and Reported Speech (sekor))), and a formal noun — most commonly p/pe, or the voice-noun hawe 'word of', or the manner-noun katu 'way of calling' — nominalizes the whole sekor a=ye clause. The copula ne then predicates it:

The variant with p produces the most common naming formula — [name] sekor a=ye p ne — which the community has discussed for its valency structure: the nominalizer p here is analysed as zero-valent (not filling an object slot in a=ye), because the transitive verb ye (+2) is already saturated by the fourth-person agent a= (−1) and the implicit zero third-person object (−1), leaving p to nominalize the whole proposition rather than fill a participant gap aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-09) ‹contested›. This analysis aligns with Nakagawa's arity account: the embedded clause is saturated (arity 0), so p functions as a complement nominalizer rather than a relative-clause head Nakagawa (2024: 507–509).

The logophoric narration that pervades yukar oral literature produces naming-cleft structures in contexts where the fourth-person a= references the narrator voicing a protagonist (see Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing) and Chapter 150 (First-Person Narration, the Logophoric Fourth Person, and Reported Discourse)). In such passages sekor a=ye p ne and its variant with hawe are a stock device for supplying proper names and category labels within the narrative Nakagawa (2024: 392).

141.4 True cleft, pseudocleft, or nominal predication?

Whether [VP] p/hi ne should be called a cleft, a pseudocleft, or a nominal predication depends on two analytical choices that remain unresolved in the literature: the structural status of the copula ne, and the source-language content of "cleft" as a cross-linguistic category.

The nominal-predication position, implicit in Nakagawa's arity account, treats [VP] p ne as a copular sentence with the nominalized NP [VP] p as one argument and the predicate nominal as the other. Nothing biclausal is required; the embedded VP is a finite clause that happens to be nominalized, and ne is the ordinary copula Nakagawa (2024: 503–509). On this reading the construction is formally parallel to any other copular sentence — 'the thing one eats is fish' is no different in type from 'this thing is a fish' — and calling it a cleft imports a typological category from languages with a structurally distinct cleft construction.

The biclausal cleft position holds that the embedded clause bears the full person and TAM marking of a main clause, and the copula is a full predicate verb; the resulting structure is therefore biclausal — a main copular clause whose subject is a nominalized subordinate clause. This is the reading Shibatani adopts when he calls -p(e) and -i "nominationalizers" and treats the construction as "appositive nominalization" Shibatani (1990: 83–84). The embedded clause retains full finiteness (person marking, number-sensitive verb choice, aspect, negation), which Bugaeva treats as the defining typological feature of Ainu nominalization: because there is no finite/non-finite morphological contrast, every embedded VP looks like a main clause, and nominalization is always formally overt, never zero Bugaeva (2016: 100, 222–225).

Neither analysis settles whether these are "true" clefts in the narrow sense of a bi-clausal structure with an empty-headed relative clause as one component. In many typological frameworks a cleft requires a relativized pivot; in [VP] p ne the nominalizer p may head a relative clause (when the embedded VP is unsaturated) or a complement clause (when it is saturated). On Nakagawa's arity principle, the choice is grammatically determined case by case, so some tokens of the surface pattern are structurally clefts and others are nominal predications ‹contested›. Satō's diagnostic — a nominalizer nominalizes a complete clause; a formal noun heads a relative clause with a recoverable antecedent — attempts to sort the cases but concedes the boundary is blurry Satō (2008: 174–175).

Whether or not the label "cleft" applies, the IS function is consistent: the copular frame [nominalized-clause] ne focuses the predicate nominal and foregrounds the nominalized content as a recoverable, asserted fact ‹consensus›. The debate over the structural label does not affect the description of that function. The copula ne and the question of its verbal status are treated in Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses); the analysis of the embedded clause's finiteness and constituency bears on the unresolved questions there.

141.5 Illocutionary force: the ne/an/∅ alternation

The tightest structural fact about the formal-noun system is that the copula slot following the formal noun determines the illocutionary type of the whole clause. Satō and Nakagawa document a four-way paradigm shared by all formal nouns Satō (2008: 136–137); Nakagawa (2024: 392–396):

Satō's motivation for the three-way split is precise: the declarative ne predicates the subject's nature or identity; the content-question an asserts that the described entity exists while its nature is the open question; and when even existence is at issue, the copula drops entirely for the polar question Satō (2008: 136–137). The content-question frame obligatorily uses the existential an: the frame *ruwe ne with a wh-word in the same clause is ill-formed; the wh-word forces the switch to an. This is a rare case in Ainu where the choice of formal-noun copula is not freely pragmatic but grammatically determined by the presence of an interrogative pro-form (see Chapter 144 (Interrogative Strategies, Question Particles, and Evidential Questions)).

The same paradigm extends to p/pe: a content question uses p an (with a wh-word) and the polar question uses bare p or pe, while pe ne ya? with the question final particle ya is also attested for content questions Nakagawa (2024: 409–410). The full range of interrogative strategies, including the polar-question particle he ‘question particle (focus-scoping)’ and its interaction with the bare formal-noun frame, is in Chapter 144 (Interrogative Strategies, Question Particles, and Evidential Questions).

141.6 The evidential frame as focus and assertion

The four evidential formal nouns ruwe, hawe, siri, and humi build exactly the same nominalization-plus-copula frame, and they carry a corresponding IS contribution: they frame the embedded proposition as established, speaker-endorsed fact. Nakagawa explicitly treats these formal nouns as complementizers of the same type as p/hi Nakagawa (2024: 508).

The IS function of each evidential frame differs by the nature of the speaker's epistemic access. ruwe ne, the most common and most grammaticalized of the four (comprising roughly 86% of evidential tokens in the Hokkaido corpus; Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential)), presents the content as a known or inferred fact — 'it is the trace/fact that …' — and serves as the workhorse of narrative assertion and scene-boundary marking. Community discussion confirms that ruwe ne does scene-shift and summary (総括) work, is particularly frequent in folktales and legends, and is used notably more by male speakers in oral literature than by female aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-09) ‹corpus-suggested›. Hirosawa connects this to its information-structural role as a marker of discourse-new content within the speaker's territory of information Hirosawa (2026: 75–81).

The full semantics, the male-register skew (a register fact of the evidential system, distinct from the gendered sentence-final particles treated in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers); compare Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force)), and the interaction with mirativity are described in the evidential chapters: Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema), Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential), Chapter 123 (hawe ne — the Reportative / Hearsay Evidential), Chapter 122 (siri ne — the Direct-Perception / Situational Evidential), Chapter 124 (humi ne — the Non-Visual Sensory Evidential).

One cross-cutting point that bears on this chapter: the ordering constraint that places the evidential frame below connectives and final particles (kusu ne ruwe ne ✓, *ruwe ne kusu ne ✗) Nakagawa (2024: 393) is a syntactic reflex of the same nominalization architecture — the evidential NP is itself an argument position in the clause-linkage hierarchy, not a free adjunct. Community discussion confirms this ordering aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-09) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

141.7 Focus particles and kakari-musubi concord

Hokkaido Ainu marks delimiting and scalar focus with a class of adverbial particles (副助詞) that add interpretive nuance to a following verb phrase, noun, or adverb without changing its grammatical category Nakagawa (2024: 317–330); Satō (2008: 63–70); Fukuda (1961). The core focus particles — patek ‘only, nothing but’, ka ‘also, even’, hem ‘also (additive)’ — are described with their full distributional and discourse properties in Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka). The present section notes only the points where they interact with the nominalization-based focus system.

patek 'only/nothing but' marks exhaustive focus. It attaches after a VP with the support of dummy ki 'do' to re-verbalize the construction for downstream connectives Nakagawa (2024: 317, 327–328); Fukuda (1961). The community notes that patek is an adverb and cannot itself be nominalized as 'the only one of —' (unlike Japanese だけ, which derives from a noun); the rising modern pattern patek ani instead of traditional ani patek is attributed to Japanese-contact influence aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-12-16) ‹contested›.

Closer to a grammaticalized focus-concord is the kakari-musubi (係り結び) system first identified by Chiri and described for Saru by Fukuda Fukuda (1961): a small set of emphatic particles concords with a specific sentence-final particle at the clause end. Nakagawa and Satō document the two productive Saru pairings Nakagawa (2024: 330); Satō (2008: 73):

The closing particle is optional in Saru — "not necessarily present" Fukuda (1961) — which complicates calling this a true productive focus-concord on the model of Japanese kakari-musubi. Whether the HA system constitutes a grammaticalized construction or a set of frozen collocations is open Nakagawa (2024: 330); Satō (2008: 73) ‹contested›.

Satō also documents a more specialized kakari-musubi-like construction in which the concept-form nouns ru 'trace', hum 'sound', sir 'appearance', or haw 'voice' precede the emphatic particle konna/kan, and the clause ends with a verb in the suffix -natara, -atki, or -rototke Satō (2008: 65–66). This construction is restricted to oral literature and its grammatical status is unclear; the nouns before konna appear in their concept form (ru, not ruwe), unlike their use as evidential formal nouns, a distribution that Satō flags as unexplained ‹contested›.