Chapter 48Kinship and Honorific Possession

48.1 Kinship terms and the two possession constructions

Kinship terms in Hokkaido Ainu are bound nouns: they do not occur without possessive morphology in ordinary prose. Like body parts, they are obligatorily possessed. Unlike body parts, they split between the two possession constructions that organise the inalienable–alienable divide: some kin terms take the affiliative form with a direct person-prefix (ku=onaha 'my father'), while others remain in the concept form governed by the transitive verb kor ‘have’ (ku=kor hapo 'my mother') Nakagawa (2024: 221–226); Satō (2008: 151). The assignment is lexically fixed and does not vary freely within a single dialect.

Bugaeva places kinship terms alongside body parts as the core of the obligatorily-possessed, inalienably-marked class in Ainu, yet the construction split shows that "inalienable" covers two morphosyntactically distinct sub-patterns rather than a single uniform category Bugaeva (2021: 52–54). The general morphosyntax of both constructions and the affiliative-suffix morphophonology are treated in Chapter 46 (Adnominal Possession: Double Marking and the Appositive Construction) and Chapter 45 (Morphophonology of the Affiliative Suffix and Echo/Copy Vowels); the present chapter covers what is specific to kinship and to the honorific use of the 4th-person possessive.

48.2 The affiliative-construction paradigm

Nakagawa organises Hokkaido kinship vocabulary into two sets: a concept-construction set, whose members take N kor and resist a direct person-prefix, and an affiliative-construction set, whose concept stem and affiliative form are both in use Nakagawa (2024: 222). The concept-construction set contains principally senior-generation terms: mici ‘father (Saru, Shizunai, Tokachi, Kushiro)’, hapo ‘mother (most dialects); father (Chitose, Horobetsu)’, ekasi ‘grandfather, elder man’, huci ‘grandmother, elder woman’, acapo ‘uncle’, unarpe ‘aunt’. The affiliative-construction set is given below, with short and long affiliative forms and, where attested, address forms.

The affiliative-suffix allomorphs follow the same phonological patterns as body-part nouns, documented in Chapter 45 (Morphophonology of the Affiliative Suffix and Echo/Copy Vowels). Vowel-final stems (type ①: ona, unu, sa, po) take the optional suffix -hV₁ for the long form — ona→onaha, unu→unuhu. Consonant-final stems mostly follow type ③-1 (-i(hi)): yup→yupi(hi), sut→suci(hi), mat→maci(hi), tures→turesi(hi). For vowel-final stems the short affiliative is formally identical to the concept form; in the 3rd person a person-prefix is the only overt marker of the possessed reading Nakagawa (2024: 227) ‹consensus›.

The two address affiliatives yupo and sapo carry an -o ending not predictable from the standard suffix classes. Nakagawa lists them as lexically specified address forms without deriving the -o morpheme synchronically Nakagawa (2024: 225–226).

48.3 Address versus reference: the vocative split

Seven affiliative-construction terms — ona, unu, sut, ekas, aca, yup, sa — are restricted to third-person reference and narrative use; they cannot be used to address the relative directly Nakagawa (2024: 224). For elder siblings the address forms are yupo and sapo with ku=; for parents and grandparents the concept-construction terms (mici, hapo, ekasi, huci) serve as vocatives Nakagawa (2024: 225–226).

Satō confirms ku=sapo and ku=yupo as the securely attested direct-address (対称詞) forms; Nakagawa additionally reports ku=mataki and ku=matkarku as vocatives to younger kin, but their distribution is less fully documented Satō (2008: 151); Nakagawa (2024: 226, ex.265) ‹contested›.

The split is grammatical, not a register choice: the construction assigned to a kin noun determines what address form is even possible Nakagawa (2024: 228). Narrative formulae use the reference forms in story-openings, where the logophoric narrator lists family members:

48.4 Obligatory possession, the 4th-person default, and the kin-group noun utar

Whether a kin term belongs to the concept-construction or the affiliative-construction set, it does not appear bare in prose; every token carries possessive morphology. When no discourse-salient possessor is active — in riddles, generic statements, or elicitation — the 4th-person A-prefix a= supplies a default unspecified-possessor value. Bugaeva reports that kin and body-part forms elicited in isolation are supplied by speakers with a 3rd- or 4th-person index and the possessive suffix, never as a bare stem Bugaeva (2021: 53).

The general kin-group noun utar ‘family, companions, kin-group members’ takes the affiliative form utari(hi) — k=utari 'my household', a=utari 'one's family (narrator's)' — and is among the higher-frequency kinship-domain tokens in the corpus Nakagawa (2024: 251–252). The community member thegodofneet (aynu-corpora Discord, 2025-09-17) observes that the affiliative naturally narrows to a possessed reading because a kin-group not belonging to anyone is conceptually difficult to express; this parallels the bound-noun tendency across kin vocabulary aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹contested›. Community member nukopoli (aynu-corpora Discord, 2026-06-15) further notes that the compounds onautari and unuutari, literally 'the father-group' and 'the mother-group', can designate 'parents' collectively aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹contested›.

48.5 Honorific possession via the 4th person

The 4th-person prefix a= carries three uses that converge on kin affiliatives: (i) the unspecified-possessor default described above; (ii) the logophoric narrator first person in oral narrative; and (iii) an honorific use, where the speaker marks an esteemed third-party possessor — a deity (kamuy), a divine ancestor, or a high-status figure — with a= rather than the zero 3rd-person form, treating the referent as too elevated for the ordinary 3rd-person default Nakagawa (2024: 174–179); (Tamura 2000). The three values are formally identical; context, genre, and the referent's status together determine the reading. The honorific-possession use is most consistent in kamuy yukar and ritual-register texts, where divine possessors regularly appear in kinship constructions with a=. This is one reason the frequency of a= with kin affiliatives in the oral-literature corpus is conspicuously higher than pure third-person reference would produce alone. The full treatment of the 4th-person paradigm and its logophoric and honorific functions is in Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing) and Chapter 68 (Honorific and Logophoric Uses of the Fourth Person); the register dimension belongs to Chapter 154 (Honorific, Ritual, and Taboo Registers).

The following example from the ILCAA Shizunai corpus shows the logophoric-narrator value of a=/an= with stacked kinship affiliatives and a possessed voice noun in a single clause:

48.6 Predicative possession with kinship affiliatives

Kinship affiliatives combine with the existential verbs an ‘exist (sg)’ and okay ‘exist (pl)’ to form predicative-possession clauses of the BE-type, restricted to body-part and kin nouns Huber (2025: 247, 251). The construction is the standard schema for story-opening family inventories:

The contrast between the two possession constructions can appear within a single clause when a body part (affiliative) and a concept-construction kin term (kor) co-occur:

The BE-type is unavailable for alienable nouns; its restriction to the inalienable domain is argued in Huber (2025: 251–253). The full typology of predicative-possession clauses is in Chapter 98 (Predicative Possession: kor, Existential Possession, and isam).

48.7 Incorporated kinship expressions

Several kin-related meanings are expressed not by the full possession construction but through lexicalised incorporated-noun + kor compounds functioning as intransitive predicates denoting change-of-state or relational events rather than stative possession Huber (2025: 251–252):

These compounds belong to a productive incorporation pattern; the reciprocal derivatives ukokor 'share (children)' and kopokor 'have a child with X' extend the set Huber (2025: 252). The incorporation pattern is treated systematically in Chapter 88 (Object (Patient) Noun Incorporation).

48.8 Dialect variation in kinship terms

The kinship lexicon shows some of the widest dialect spread in Hokkaido Ainu, and the construction assignments in each dialect interact with local lexical choices Nakagawa (2024: 223–224).

'Father' is the most variable kin term. The oldest reconstructed form is aca (affiliative-construction; current in Sōya and Samani); mici (concept-construction) is the baseline for Horobetsu, Shizunai, Tokachi, Kushiro, Bihoro, and main Saru; iyapo appears in lower Saru; hampe in Ishikari; and hapo in Chitose. Where hapo means 'father', 'mother' shifts to totto to avoid homonymy with the widespread hapo 'mother' Nakagawa (2024: 223). The community member thegodofneet (aynu-corpora Discord, 2026-06-08) cites Chiri's dialect survey for the same mapping and notes that hapo extends further to 'elder sibling' in Kuril varieties aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

Eastern Hokkaido fusion forms. In Tokachi the compounds konnarpe 'aunt' (< kor unarpe), koracapo 'uncle', and koruci 'grandmother' have grammaticalised to the point where internal structure is opaque; 'so-and-so's aunt' then requires kor konnarpe, treating the formerly bimorphemic form as a simplex concept-form noun Nakagawa (2024: 223, ex.257) ‹speculative›.

The younger-sister asymmetry reflects the bilateral-descent kinship system. 'Younger brother' is ak across Hokkaido; 'younger sister of a sister' is matak (all-Hokkaido, from mat-ak 'female younger-sibling'). 'Younger sister of a brother' varies: Saru uses matapa (from mat-apa, denoting a more distant relation), Chitose uses macirpe, and oral-narrative tradition generally uses tures(i) Nakagawa (2024: 223–224).

The form onneke(he) 'mother / parent', found in the Tokachi (Honbetsu) and Nemuro varieties, and onneike 'parent' in Asahikawa, follows the standard type-① affiliative pattern: onneke→onnekehe. The community member antitwilight (aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-15) proposes the etymology onne 'old' + -ike 'person', with semantic narrowing from 'the elder [side of the household]' to 'parent' and further to 'mother' in some varieties aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹speculative›.

Across these variants the construction assignment — concept-set or affiliative-set — is stable within each dialect: variation affects which lexical item is chosen, not the morphosyntactic class it belongs to ‹consensus›.