Chapter 47Possessors in Noun Incorporation

47.1 When a possessor becomes the verbal subject

In some Ainu noun-incorporating predicates, a body-part noun forms a single stem with a verb, while the person whose body part is involved becomes the subject of the resulting predicate. Satō calls this possessor-requiring subject incorporation Satō (2016: 84–86); Satō (2022: §3.3). It provides a concrete instance of the grammatical relation often discussed as possessor raising or stranding.

Satō's Chitose comparison makes the change visible:

In the first clause, the possessed hand is the subject of “be heavy.” In the second, the possessor is the subject of the whole incorporated predicate. The affiliative -e remains in the noun stem. The two occurrences of ku= have the same shape, but the first indexes nominal possession and the second the intransitive verbal subject.

47.2 Person marking, valency, and incorporation type

The change in grammatical relation does not require a prefix to become a suffix. First-singular ku= remains prefixed in the published example. The fourth-person intransitive form uses a different position in the person paradigm; this follows the person system described in Chapter 62 (Person Marking and Argument Roles) Satō (2022: §2, examples 1–2).

Satō describes this construction as retaining verbal valency: the body-part subject is incorporated, while its possessor supplies the resulting subject. He assigns it to Mithun's Type II, which changes the grammatical relation of an element outside the incorporating verb Satō (2022: §3.3); Mithun (1984). The broader incorporation classification appears in Chapter 89 (Subject Incorporation and External Possessors).

47.3 Backgrounding and reflexive interpretation

Satō explains the construction through a combination of body-part backgrounding and a reflexive interpretation: the incorporated noun's possessor is understood as the subject of the whole predicate. In his account, this limits how independently the incorporated noun is specified Satō (2016: 85–87); Satō (2022: §§4–5) ‹contested›. This is a theoretical explanation of the pattern. The published comparison establishes the grammatical contrast more directly than it establishes a general discourse condition for choosing it.

47.4 A comparison without possession

Ainu also has incorporation in which an external subject corresponds to a patient. Satō compares a clause where waves wash someone with an incorporated predicate meaning that the person is washed by waves Satō (2016: 85, example 4); Satō (2022: §3.4, example 24).

The person here is the affected patient. There is no possessive relation between that person and the waves. The example illustrates another change in grammatical relation caused by incorporation, with a different semantic basis.

47.5 Object incorporation has different restrictions

The subject pattern cannot simply be extended to objects. Satō rejects *a-i-par-oyki for “People support me,” with i- interpreted as a person index for the possessor of the incorporated mouth. He gives the phrasal alternative i-par a-oyki, and treats this close noun–verb combination as quasi-incorporation Satō (2016: 89–90); Satō (2022: §4, examples 28–29; §6).

The verbal pattern corresponds to Tamura's 連他動詞, a phrase whose noun and verb together express a conventional verbal meaning Tamura (1997: 15, §C.4). Satō distinguishes its two morphological words from its status as one lexical unit. His later extension to or plus a case particle is discussed in Chapter 52 (Relational Nouns, Spatial Forms, and Quasi-Incorporation); the verbal construction receives fuller treatment in Chapter 90 (Incorporation, Quasi-Incorporation, and Word Structure).

A different, derivational i- appears in formations with an unspecified possessor. Bugaeva, Nichols and Bickel analyze it as antipassive morphology functioning as unspecified-possessor marking when the possessor is non-coreferential with the subject. Their examples include i-rekut-tuye “cut someone's throat,” reported from Okuda (1999) Bugaeva, Nichols & Bickel (2022: 54, example 16b and note 11). Satō likewise distinguishes derivational and inflectional uses of the homophonous prefix Satō (2022: §4).

These object-incorporation conditions concern different constructions from tek-e-pase. They do not require the affiliative vowel to disappear from the subject-incorporating example.

47.6 Related derivations and the scope of the comparison

Kobayashi uses “affiliative-like” for some valency-neutral e- and o- derivatives referring to a head/tip or a lower/end part. His analysis retains the participant whose part is involved and distinguishes these patterns from valency-increasing applicatives Kobayashi (2025: 171, 176). His proposed relation to verb classes is a tendency with an acknowledged counterexample ‹contested›.

Applicative prefixes have a wider range of argument-structural functions Bugaeva (2006: 185–187, 192). Those functions are described in Chapter 78 (Applicative Constructions and Their Arguments). The possessor-to-subject contrast developed here rests on the specific incorporation examples and their person-marking diagnostics.