Chapter 120Formal Nouns and Evidential Constructions

120.1 Formal nouns and judgments about a situation

Ruwe, siri, hawe, and humi can take a preceding clause as their content. They also enter clause endings that relate the situation to a speaker's knowledge or perception. Their ordinary noun counterparts concern traces, appearance, voice, and sound or feeling Nakagawa (2024: 391–392).

Nakagawa distinguishes an internal noun phrase from an ending that comments on the assertion. Hearing ‘the voice of my brother crying out’, for example, makes the voice part of what the sentence describes. An ending in hawe ne has a different grammatical role Nakagawa (2024: 391, example 774; 392–393).

These descriptions follow Nakagawa's summary Nakagawa (2024: 392). They need the qualifications developed in the individual chapters. In particular, hawe ne can accompany the speaker's own wording:

120.2 Clause endings and regional differences

For the southern constructions, Nakagawa describes declarative N + ne, content questions with N + an, bare nouns in polar questions and exclamations, and affirmative replies with N + un. Each frame has its own qualifications and possible continuations Nakagawa (2024: 392–396).

Tokachi frequently uses shorter ru, sir, haw, and hum. Takahashi's Tokachi material includes declarative N + an and a relative construction containing it. An an ending consequently cannot be identified as a question solely from its surface form Takahashi (2013: 129–131, §3).

120.3 Comparing the analyses

The term evidentiality concerns how an utterance relates information to its source. The Ainu constructions also raise questions about interpretation, speaker knowledge, and discourse. Their noun morphology does not itself settle these semantic questions.

Dal Corso distinguishes direct forms ruwe ne, siri ne, humi ne, hawe ne from indirect forms siri an, siri ki, humi as, hawe as in the Hokkaido material he surveys. His model uses both event accessibility and source reliability; the two inventories do not constitute four simple identical-noun pairs Dal Corso (2018: 337–338, table 18).

Hirosawa proposes that ruwe refers to knowledge formed through the speaker's internal processing of information. The account connects this with the presentation of new information and with whose informational domain a proposition belongs to Hirosawa (2026: 63, 81–82, §§6.4–6.5).

120.4 Negation, ordering, and further reading

Negating the preceding predicate differs from placing somo before the copula. Nakagawa gives rhetorical confirmation for ruwe somo ne, while Tamura also describes N somo ne as ordinary denial Nakagawa (2024: 393, examples 779–780)Tamura (1997: 71). The interpretation must retain the source's construction and context.

Ordering restrictions are similarly specific. Nakagawa permits kusu ne ruwe ne and rejects the reverse order in that construction, while allowing auxiliaries such as nankor after N + ne Nakagawa (2024: 393–394). For the four noun families, see Chapter 121 (Ruwe: Fact, Knowledge, and Clause Endings), Chapter 122 (Siri: Visible Appearance and Ongoing Situations), Chapter 123 (Hawe: Voice, Wording, and Reports), and Chapter 124 (Humi: Sensation and Internal Experience). Their combinations are considered in Chapter 125 (Evidential Combinations, Discovery, and Structural Change).