Chapter 118Necessity, Advice, and Permission
Easirki, obligation and expectation with kuni, conditional advice and permission, and ordinary person marking in indirect directives.
118.1 What has to be done
Obligation, advice, permission, and expectation are expressed through several constructions. The auxiliary easirki directly expresses necessity. Nakagawa finds it chiefly in Saru examples, with Horobetsu evidence as well Nakagawa (2024: 308).
‘We must go to your father; what are you doing?’
Nakagawa 2024: 308; Saru, Example 457, citing Chiba University 2015:390
The first clause concerns a plural group including the speaker. P links the necessity with the reproach expressed by the question.
118.2 Kuni: obligation and expectation
Kuni spans what is supposed to happen, what is expected, and what ought to be done. Nakagawa gives it before a noun, before final un, and before pekor ‘as if’ Nakagawa (2024: 309, examples 461–463). A translation with ‘should’ must therefore be read in context: it can express an expectation as well as a requirement.
Satō states that kuni does not occur alone at the end of a sentence in this use; the example continues through p ne. Nakagawa's ene ne kuni un instead means ‘that must be so’, with a final particle Satō (2008: 84)Nakagawa (2024: 309, example 462). For complement and purpose constructions, see Chapter 107 (Kuni, Indirect Complements, and Purpose Clauses).
118.3 Advice and permission
A conditional clause followed by a property predicate can advise someone how to act. Satō describes yak pirka, literally ‘if …, good’, and yak wen, literally ‘if …, bad’, as conventional ways to give positive and negative advice Satō (2009: 51, examples 23–24).
Permission can be expressed with yakka pirka. In Nakagawa's Saru exchange, e=arpa yakka pirka answers a speaker considering departure: ‘you may go’ Nakagawa (2024: 334, example 578, citing Tamura 1988a:55). These particular constructions do not establish a complete paradigm in which every connective and property predicate has one fixed modal value.
118.4 Directive force and grammatical person
Yak pirka, kusu ne na, p ne na, and nankor na can also serve as indirect directives. They retain ordinary person marking, including third-person formulations that name the people addressed Nakagawa (2024: 423–424). Their interpretation depends on the speaker's relation to the addressee and the context of the instruction; they do not all contain a morpheme meaning ‘must’.
Compare Chapter 114 (Commands, Requests, and Prohibitions) for direct commands and prohibitions, and Chapter 119 (Conjecture, Intention, and Prospective Events) for conjecture and prospective events.