Chapter 99Property-Concept (Adjectival) Predication without a Copula

99.1 Property words as intransitive verbs

Property-concept words — pirka ‘be good’, poro ‘be big’, wen ‘be bad’, tanne ‘be long, tall’, pon ‘be small’, hure ‘be red’, pewre ‘be young’, rui ‘be heavy, strong’, ri ‘be high’ and their class-mates — occupy the predicate slot of a simple clause without a copula. The clause cape pon 'the cat is small' is structurally parallel to cape hoyupu 'the cat ran': in both, a bare intransitive verb is the entire predicate Nakagawa (2024: 118); Nakagawa (2022: 474–475). This behavior reflects a categorical fact: Hokkaido Ainu has no dedicated adjective word class ‹consensus›. What English and Japanese encode in a distinct adjective category is covered in Ainu by a set of intransitive stative verbs. The three-criterion argument — morphological identity with intransitive verbs, structural parallelism in the prenominal slot, and evidential compatibility — is set out in Chapter 37 (The 'No Adjective Class' Thesis: Property Concepts as Stative Verbs); the present chapter treats the predication patterns that the analysis implies.

Because property words are verbs, they take subject-agreement affixes, combine with the standard clausal negation morphology, and take the evidential tail ruwe ne exactly as any other predicate does Nakagawa (2024: 118–119); Satō (2008: 20–21). A learner who writes *pirka ne for '(it) is good' has imported a copula requirement that the grammar does not impose Nakagawa (2024: 119). The copula ne is restricted to predicate-nominal clauses (see Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses)) and cannot combine with a property verb.

99.2 Person marking

Property verbs take the intransitive subject (S) person affixes — the same set that marks the sole argument of action verbs — following the paradigm described in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms). The prefix ku= marks first-singular S on any intransitive stem, whether it denotes motion, existence, or a property:

The full intransitive paradigm applies without adjustment. The table below illustrates with pirka ‘be good’ (Saru–Chitose); the forms are constructed on the basis of Nakagawa (2024: 118, 165–167):

The third-person cell is zero-marked, as for all intransitive verbs; the fourth-person (INDEF) uses the enclitic =an. No object affix can appear: property verbs are strictly intransitive and take no object slot. A member of the aynu-corpora community observed that the zero-marked (3rd-person) form of pirka shifts contextually toward 'that's fine / it's OK' when no overt subject is present, while person-marked forms like e=pirka read as a direct evaluation of the indexed person ('you are beautiful, in good shape') aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, November 2024) ‹contested›.

99.3 Attributive and predicative positions

Property verbs appear in two syntactic positions: as bare predicates heading the main clause, and as prenominal modifiers preceding a noun head. The morphological form is identical in both — a fact recognized since Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 123) ‹consensus›. In predicative position the property verb alone constitutes the predicate:

In attributive position the same verb precedes the noun head with no morphological change — no suffix, no linker, no case marker. This is structurally parallel to a prenominal relative clause in Ainu, where the predicate verb likewise immediately precedes the head noun Nakagawa (2022: 475); see Chapter 103 (Relative Clauses: The Gap Strategy and the Accessibility Hierarchy):

The prenominal slot admits person-marked property verbs: ku=pewre or ta in the example above reads as 'in the time of my being young', a headless relative clause with the property verb predicated of the implicit head Nakagawa (2024: 118). This confirms that the prenominal position is a syntactic slot that verbs occupy, not a morphologically distinct adjectival form.

99.4 The stative–inchoative duality

Like other Ainu verbs, property-concept words encode both the state ('be X') and its onset ('become X') without distinct forms; context determines the reading Nakagawa (2024: 118–119); Nakagawa (2022: 477). poro means 'be big' in poro cise an 'there is a big house' (see Chapter 97 (Existential and Locational Clauses (an / oka))) and 'grow big' in the following corpus example:

The inchoative reading is contextual, not morphological. It follows that the copula ne cannot be inserted to force an inchoative: *poro ne for 'become big' is ungrammatical in Hokkaido Ainu Nakagawa (2024: 119). Where the copula does appear after an inchoative-type expression (as in nispa ne 'become a chief'), the complement is a nominal, not a property verb. The copula's own stative–inchoative duality belongs to the predicate-nominal system treated in Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses).

A community discussion noted that both ne an and pirka an carry 'become' readings, raising the question whether the existential an contributes an inchoative-aspect value in such environments aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, November 2024) ‹speculative›. The aspectual uses of an as a periphrastic auxiliary are set out in Chapter 110 (The Existential-Aspect System: kor an Progressive and wa an Resultative-Perfect).

99.5 Negation

Property verbs follow the standard clausal negation strategies of intransitive verbs: the negator somo precedes the verb (somo V), or the frame V ka somo ki is used for contrastive or emphatic negation Nakagawa (2024: 127); Satō (2008: 21–22):

These patterns contrast with the dedicated frames required by the copula and the existential Satō (2008: 22); Nakagawa (2024: 407, 450). The copula requires X ka somo ne (the negator placed before ne itself), and the existential an recruits its suppletive negative isam 'not exist'. The property verb is the only non-dynamic predicate type that takes ordinary clausal negation, a direct reflex of its status as an ordinary intransitive verb. The full scope of negation across predicate types is treated in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo) and Chapter 100 (TAM, Evidentiality, and Negation on Nonverbal Predicates).

99.6 Degree and intensification

Property verbs carry no inherent comparative or degree morphology. Degree is expressed by adverbs that precede the property verb without triggering any change to its form Nakagawa (2024: 120). The most frequently recruited degree adverbs are sonno ‘really, truly’, arikinne ‘very’, poronno ‘greatly, a lot’, and earkinne ‘exceedingly’. The following example shows arikinne scoping over an attributive property verb:

The prefix si- combines directly with the verb root for intensification: si-poro 'really big' Nakagawa (2024: 120).

Property verbs also generate manner adverbs for other predicates through the suffix -no: tunas ‘be fast’ yields tunasno 'fast(ly)', moyre ‘be slow’ yields moyreno 'slowly' Nakagawa (2024: 120). The derived adverb quantifies the manner of the event described by the main predicate and is not itself a predicate. The comparative construction (akkari 'surpassing, more than') and the full adverb system are treated in Chapter 146 (Adverbs, Degree Words, and Comparison Strategies); the sources consulted do not provide a systematic degree–comparison paradigm for property verbs, and the gap is noted there.

99.7 The adjective debate

The classical treatment in Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 123–124) (§§129, 189–193) recognized that property words inflect for person just as verbs do, yet nonetheless posited a separate 形容詞 'adjective' class defined by its dual attributive–predicative distribution. Kindaichi conceded the instability of the boundary directly: "the difference between a verb and an adjective is razor-thin" (動詞と形容詞の差は紙一重; §129). His own person-inflection tables for 形容詞 reproduce the intransitive S paradigm without modification — the concession is already implicit in the paradigm.

Chiri's reanalysis (Chiri (1942), summarized in Nakagawa (2022: 478)) proposed the 用詞 category — a class of stative verbs covering property meanings — and collapsed the distinction. All subsequent major grammars of Hokkaido Ainu adopt that position: Refsing (1986) classifies property words as a semantically defined subclass of verbs without a distinct morphosyntactic status; Shibatani (1990: 19) notes that property words take "the same personal affixes" as intransitive verbs; Satō (2008: 21) places them within his four-verb-type classification as a stative subtype; and Nakagawa (2022: 474–478) provides the most detailed argument, covering all three diagnostic dimensions ‹consensus›. In terms of the cross-linguistic typology of intransitive predication (Stassen 1997), Hokkaido Ainu is an unambiguous case of the verbal-property type: the coding of property meanings through intransitive verbs extends without exception to every diagnostic — morphological marking, syntactic distribution, TAM compatibility, and negation strategy.

One genuinely open question concerns the interaction of property predication with the evidential system. Takahashi's study of Tokachi Ainu shows that individual-level (permanent) property predicates select the trace nominalizer ru rather than the visual nominalizer sir, because the visual form is restricted to stage-level (transient) predicates Takahashi (2013: 131–133). This predication-type constraint operates on individual-level vs. stage-level readings across the verb inventory and is not specific to property words, but it shows that the ontological character of property predicates is grammatically active in Ainu. The interaction of property predicates with the evidential paradigm is treated in Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential) and Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema).