Chapter 44Concept, Affiliative, and Personal Forms

44.1 Concept, affiliative, and personal forms

The concept form is the base noun: for example, tek “hand.” Its affiliative forms, teke and tekehe, express a hand in relation to its possessor. A person marker identifies that possessor, as in ku=tekehe “my hand” Nakagawa (2022: §4.2); Nakagawa (2024: 219). Satō distinguishes the affiliative from the resulting personal form, illustrated with par → paro → e-paro “your mouth” Satō (2008: 152–153).

Kindaichi and Chiri's older terms “abstract” and “concrete” describe the corresponding distinction Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 16–17, §16). The terminology should not imply that affiliative forms refer only to things already identified in the conversation. Generic and unspecified possessors also occur, as the examples below show.

44.2 Short and long affiliatives

Many nouns have a short and a long affiliative. Compare siki / sikihi “someone's eye” and sapa / sapaha “someone's head.” With vowel-final sapa, the short affiliative has the same segmental form as the concept form Satō (2008: 153–154). Third-person possession adds no pronounced person marker, so an affiliative can appear without a visible prefix.

Satō reports no apparent meaning difference between short and long forms but leaves their distribution unresolved. Nakagawa associates the alternation with prosody and rhythm Satō (2008: 153–154); Nakagawa (2024: 219, 226). Refsing finds short forms more often in her Shizunai material, with long forms relatively frequent for monosyllabic words Refsing (1986: 85). These observations do not establish free interchangeability in every environment.

Suffix selection depends partly on the stem's final segment and partly on the individual noun. The full set of patterns, including exceptional forms, is in Chapter 45 (Affiliative Suffix Patterns).

44.3 Person marking on ordinary nouns

Ordinary affiliative nouns use the same person series as transitive subjects. This is conventionally called the A series; its presence on a noun identifies a possessor, without making that possessor an agent Satō (2008: 155); Nakagawa (2022: §4.4). Relational nouns have a different pattern, described in Chapter 52 (Relational Nouns, Spatial Forms, and Quasi-Incorporation).

Satō's Chitose paradigm provides the following forms. Accent marks and hyphens are retained here. His inclusive row uses the form treated under the fourth-person system in Chapter 62 (Person Marking and Argument Roles) Satō (2008: 155).

The symbol Ø represents the absence of a pronounced person marker. The shortened k- and c- before otop illustrate prefix contraction. Its dialect and phonological conditions are treated in Chapter 31 (Person Markers: Contraction, Accent, and Suffix Boundaries).

44.4 An expressed or contextually supplied possessor

A separate possessor noun phrase need not accompany every personal form. Satō's Chitose siki can itself mean “his/her eye(s),” with the possessor supplied by the context. First- and second-person independent pronouns likewise commonly remain unexpressed Satō (2008: 156); Bugaeva, Nichols & Bickel (2022: 52).

The possessor may also be separated from the affiliative noun. Satō discusses examples with intervening topic anakne and argues that the person-marked noun has substantial grammatical independence. He therefore questions a uniform analysis of every possessor–affiliative sequence as a single tightly integrated noun phrase Satō (2008: 156–157) ‹contested›. Further constructional differences appear in Chapter 46 (Adnominal Possession and Double Marking) and Chapter 47 (Possessors in Noun Incorporation).

44.5 Generic and unspecified possessors

An affiliative can have a generic possessor. Nakagawa quotes Satō (1997: 150) on a Chitose sentence meaning that all humans have bellies; the belly noun is honihi. He also gives a Saru warning about pointing at a rainbow with fourth-person a=teke, referring generally to a person's hand Nakagawa (2024: 231).

Bugaeva, Nichols and Bickel quote an eyes riddle from Tamura (1993: 16, 18), whose answer contains a-sik-ihi. The fourth-person marker supplies an unspecified human possessor Bugaeva, Nichols & Bickel (2022: 53, example 15). In object-incorporating formations, the same authors discuss antipassive i- as marking a possessor non-coreferential with the subject, using Tamura's and Okuda's examples Bugaeva, Nichols & Bickel (2022: 53–54, examples 16–18). That analysis concerns incorporation; it does not make i- an alternative possessive prefix for every independent noun.

44.6 Grammatical conditions and unresolved uses

Nakagawa contrasts saraha tanne seta “a dog with a long tail” with a rejected version containing concept-form sar. The dog need not be a specific individual; the tail noun nevertheless takes its affiliative form. He argues that grammar must supplement a purely semantic condition on specificity Nakagawa (2024: 231–232). His earlier treatment illustrates the parallel construction with a fox Nakagawa (2022: §4.2).

Some uses remain less clear. Nouns following usa “various” or nep “what” sometimes have affiliative forms. Nakagawa tentatively connects some verse uses after usa with syllable count, while noting that adjacent expressions can differ: his Chitose example has affiliative cikapi but concept-form cironnup. He proposes a possessive interpretation for the wider range after nep Nakagawa (2024: 232–233) ‹speculative›. Neither expression licenses an automatic rule for all following nouns.