Chapter 116Desire, Rusuy, and Compound Predicates

116.1 Desire after a predicate

The auxiliary rusuy commonly expresses wanting to perform an action. In the separate-auxiliary construction, the preceding verb carries person marking. Rusuy itself does not inflect Satō (2008: 77)Nakagawa (2024: 305, 311).

Desire can concern another person. Refsing gives Shizunai questions about the addressee's wish to eat, conditional clauses of the same kind, and a narrative about a horse deity wanting a wife Refsing (1986: 205–206, examples 312–314). The grammatical construction is therefore not restricted to first-person assertions.

116.2 A phrase or a compound

Rusuy can also combine with the preceding verb as one word. Nakagawa contrasts ahun=an rusuy with arpa-rusuy=an. In the first, the person suffix follows ‘enter’; in the second, it follows the whole ‘want to go’ combination Nakagawa (2024: 294, examples 406–407).

Iperusuy ‘be hungry’ and konrusuy ‘want something’ are commonly single words in Nakagawa's account, related respectively to ipe ‘eat’ and kor ‘have’ Nakagawa (2024: 311–312). A person suffix after such a compound supplies no evidence for a freely independent verb rusuy. Nakagawa explicitly rejects a separate apkas a=rusuy as the counterpart of ‘want to walk’ Nakagawa (2024: 491, examples 1124–1124′).

116.3 Whose wish?

Tamura describes ordinary Saru V rusuy as expressing the action participant's desire. For wishing that someone else act, she gives a clause with hi followed by person-marked ki rusuy. One example concerns wanting a young woman to become acquainted with the speaker's younger sister Tamura (1960: §12, 74 (continuous pagination 350)).

Refsing reports a different Shizunai construction: toonpe en=koitak rusuy, translated as a wish that the addressee tell the speaker something Refsing (1986: 206, example 315). This source difference prevents a universal rule identifying the desirer from the position of a person marker alone.

Rusuy can also describe an impending feeling without an active wish for it. Tamura's tane k=etoranne rusuy humi as expresses feeling about to become fed up Tamura (1960: §12, 74 (continuous pagination 350)).

116.4 Competing incorporation analyses

Nakagawa treats the one-word V-rusuy pattern as a strong candidate for auxiliary incorporation, since rusuy lacks the independent verbal use available to some other auxiliaries Nakagawa (2024: 491). Satō instead analyzes ipe-rusuy-an through incorporation of a nominalized intransitive into rusuy. He proposes pseudo-incorporation for the morphologically separate a=e rusuy construction, using it to explain how the auxiliary construction relates to head marking Satō (2025: 374–375, examples 26–27).

These proposals assign the structural relations differently. Satō's argument about the illustrated transitive construction should also be read alongside Nakagawa's lexical konrusuy. For the broader distinctions among incorporation, quasi-incorporation, and morphological wordhood, see Chapter 90 (Incorporation, Quasi-Incorporation, and Word Structure).