Chapter 92Constituent Order and the Verb-Final Clause
Preverbal noun phrases and adverbials, differing accounts of participant order, head-final phrases, clause endings, and later specifications with ki.
92.1 The verb and the material following it
The ordinary Ainu clause places noun phrases and adverbial expressions before its verb phrase. Auxiliaries, sentence endings and clause-linking material may follow the lexical verb Nakagawa (2024: 361–365). “Verb-final” describes the predicate's relation to its preceding participants and modifiers; it does not mean that the lexical verb must be the final spoken word.
Nakagawa's structural description permits lexical noun phrases to be absent when their interpretation can be supplied from context. His technical term for a sentence containing all of the predicate's lexical arguments does not make shorter utterances ungrammatical Nakagawa (2024: 362); see Chapter 93 (Argument Realization and Person Indexing).
92.2 Preverbal order and participant interpretation
The descriptions differ in the role they assign to noun-phrase order. Shibatani treats SOV as basic and uses a bear–person comparison to show order determining the ordinary interpretation. He also recognizes OSV where context or lexical meaning makes the roles clear Shibatani (1990: 23). Nakagawa places greater emphasis on the absence of a grammatically fixed subject–object order and on contextual interpretation ‹contested› Nakagawa (2024: 363–365).
‘My wife taught our daughter women's work.’
Nakagawa 2024: 364; Chitose, Example 701
This example has addressee–theme–actor order. Nakagawa's examples 700–702 come from the same speaker in different stories; they are not an elicited permutation paradigm.
The interpretation remains wife as teacher, daughter as learner, and work as the subject matter. Nakagawa notes that the reverse assignment of wife and daughter is structurally possible but less plausible in the described situation. He tentatively connects initial position with topic-marked expressions in some examples Nakagawa (2024: 364–365). The Saru example he adds has yet another order and separate provenance.
92.3 Adverbials and head-final phrases
Adverbial phrases can occur among the noun phrases before the verb. Nakagawa illustrates a temporal expression, a subject, an instrumental phrase, a manner adverb and an object in that order Nakagawa (2024: 361).
‘Yesterday my mother hit my hand hard with chopsticks.’
Nakagawa 2024: 361; Author's illustration 696
The two first-person prefixes belong to possessed nouns. The actor of kik is the mother, and its object is the hand.
Postpositions follow their noun phrases; demonstrative modifiers and modifying clauses precede their head nouns. These patterns motivate the description of Ainu as generally head-final Shibatani (1990: 23); Nakagawa (2024: 365). Nominal numerals and particles have their own positions, so this generalization does not replace the constructional description in Chapter 42 (Noun-Phrase Structure).
92.4 Clause endings and later specifications
Sentence-final forms and connectives follow the predicate, while negators such as somo and prohibitive forms precede the verb phrase Nakagawa (2024: 361–365). A clause may also be followed by another expression specifying a participant. Bugaeva describes examples in which a nounless predicate is followed by a noun phrase with support verb ki, making the participant clearer Bugaeva (2022: §4.3). These extended constructions require their own analysis; they do not erase the ordinary verb-final pattern. See Chapter 59 (Ki, Support Constructions, and Pro-Verbs).