Chapter 171A Glossed Everyday-Conversation Text

171.1 The passage and its source

The passage glossed in this chapter is drawn from the Asahikawa section of Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai (1994), a conversational textbook produced by the Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai to accompany a set of VHS recordings. Two speakers are documented: Sugimura Fusa (杉村フサ) and Kawamura Tome (川村トメ), both of Asahikawa (旭川市). The exchange depicts a neighbour's visit — calling at the door, being invited in, exchanging a well-being greeting, and closing with a weather remark — and brings into a single connected stretch several constructions that are analysed in separate chapters of this grammar: the polar-question frame of the evidential, the 1SG and 2SG person prefixes, the causal connective kusu, and the inferential auxiliary nankor. The dialect is Asahikawa (Nakagawa (2024: 82–83)), a northern Hokkaido variety; the transcription uses the romanization conventions of the original publication, with small-kana codas rendered as their consonant values.

The register is everyday colloquial speech, sharply distinct from the elevated vocabulary of oral-literature genres (Chapter 168 (A Glossed Uwepeker (Prose Folktale)); Chapter 170 (A Glossed Inonno-itak (Ritual Prayer))) and from the gendered-register differences documented in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers). The published source is Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai (1994: 2–3); Asahikawa section, speakers Sugimura Fusa and Kawamura Tome.

171.2 Arrival and entry

Sugimura calls through the closed door, addressing her friend as sapo (older sister, a close-kin address term). The existential verb an ‘exist, be’ appears without a person prefix: in Hokkaido Ainu, the 3rd person is zero-marked (Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms)), and the intended referent — the woman inside — is a 3rd-person entity from the caller's perspective. The formal noun ruwe in its bare clause-final position, without the following copula ne, builds the polar-question frame rather than the declarative evidential (the polar-question frame).

Kawamura responds and invites her visitor in. The directive particle ya ‘please (softener)’ in Asahikawa corresponds to yan in Saru and most other varieties (a difference noted in a footnote of the original publication Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai (1994: 2)); it functions as a polite imperative softener, not as the default bare imperative (Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force)). The motion verb ahun ‘enter’ is the singular form; its suppletive plural is ahup. A single visitor is addressed, hence the singular (Chapter 58 (Verbal Number: Suppletive Stems and the Pluractional -pa)).

171.3 The well-being exchange

Later in the visit Sugimura enquires after Kawamura's well-being, now with an explicit 2nd-person prefix on the same existential verb an. The contrast between the zero-marked opening question (an ruwe?, §2) and the prefix-marked well-being question shows the full range of the person system operating on a single verb stem: 3rd-person referents are zero-marked, while 1SG and 2SG carry distinct prefixes throughout Hokkaido (Chapter 63 (First- and Second-Person Singular Affixes (ku=/en=, e=/e=))).

Person marking in the Ainu verb is obligatory in careful speech; its omission in the opening formula above reflects conversational reduction where the referent is fully recoverable from the situation (Nakagawa (2024: 163); Satō (2008: 100–101)). The conjunctive particle wa connecting or closing clauses is treated in Chapter 132 (Sequential wa and Clause Chaining).

171.4 A weather exchange

The visit closes with a brief weather exchange. Kawamura's remark is a biclausal construction: a causal adverbial clause in kusu ‘because’ followed by a main-clause assertion. The causal connective belongs to the pattern treated in Chapter 136 (Causal and Purpose Clauses (kusu)). The property verb merayke ‘be cold’ is an intransitive predicate whose subject — the weather — is zero-marked at 3rd person. Bugaeva (2022)

Sugimura's agreeing response uses the same property verb merayke ‘be cold’ with the 4th-person intransitive suffix =an. The 4th / indefinite person, whose S-role index is =an, shifts the perspective from a specific 3rd-person subject to a general experiencer (Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing)). The existential-type aspect form V=an is the same suffix in its aspectual function, discussed in Chapter 97 (Existential and Locational Clauses (an / oka)).

Kawamura rounds off the exchange with a prediction, using the inferential auxiliary nankor. Unlike ruwe ne, which presents content as already-established knowledge (Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential)), nankor encodes a tentative, inference-based assertion: the speaker reasons from current conditions rather than perceiving or reporting the future event directly. The auxiliary is discussed as part of the epistemic-modal paradigm in Chapter 119 (Epistemic Modality, Dubitative, Intentive, and Irrealis) and at the evidential-mirative interface in Chapter 125 (Mirativity, Evidential Scope, and Grammaticalization to Sentence-Final Particles). The Asahikawa form undergoes sandhi: nankor followed by the final particle na surfaces as nankornā, rendered in the source's Katakana as ナンコンナー.

171.5 Synopsis of constructions

The seven utterances above cover a cluster of constructions whose full analyses belong to separate chapters. The table maps each to its primary grammatical feature.

The passage also illustrates a characteristic feature of Ainu conversational structure: each turn-final predicate controls the evidential or modal framing for the whole turn — ruwe in the questions, wa in the open-chain response, bare na in the assertions, and nankor na in the inference. The parallel between this conversational pattern and the evidential-turn structure of oral-literature frame-text is noted in Nakagawa (2024: 392–396); the contrast with oral-literature patterning is illustrated in Chapter 155 (Narrative TAM and Evidential Patterning by Genre).