Chapter 104General Heads, Gapless Clauses, and Internal-Head Analyses
Overt light heads, complement relations, and Dal Corso’s source-limited incorporation and internally headed relative proposals.
104.1 Different questions about a noun-modifying clause
A general head, an internally complete clause, and an internally headed relative describe different properties. The first concerns the head's lexical meaning, the second the roles within the clause, and the third the proposed position of the head. Keeping them separate makes the Ainu analyses easier to compare Bugaeva (2012: 480)Nakagawa (2024: 507–508)Dal Corso (2020: 63–65).
| Construction | Relevant property |
|---|---|
| Relative with a general head | An overt head such as p/pe or kur identifies a participant in the clause. |
| Gapless noun-modifying clause | The following noun has no argument or adjunct role inside the preceding clause. |
| Nominalized complement | A clause functions within a larger sentence as, for example, a subject or object. |
| Proposed internally headed relative | Dal Corso analyzes certain copied sensory nouns as heads remaining inside a relative clause. |
104.2 General heads remain heads
Bugaeva lists kur ‘person’, utar ‘people’, p/pe ‘thing, person’ and place-related forms among the common heads of Ainu relatives Bugaeva (2015: 47). An English translation such as ‘what I carried’ can conceal the overt Ainu head. It does not establish syntactic headlessness. See Chapter 101 (P and Pe: Participants, Content, and Clause Endings) for examples with p/pe.
General heads also occur in the comparison-equivalent construction. Bugaeva's pak sermaka yupke p isam pe e=ne describes someone whose guardian deity has no equal in strength, with both p and pe in the construction Bugaeva (2015: 55, example 30). This belongs to her degree-relative analysis, distinct from relativization of a comparative standard proper.
104.3 Clauses with no head-related gap
‘The smell of you rotting’
Bugaeva 2012: 480; Chitose, Example 41, citing Bugaeva 2004:96
Bugaeva treats this as a noun-modifying construction whose head cannot be restored as an argument or adjunct of the preceding predicate.
The smell is related to the event of rotting, but it does not fill a missing role in e=munin. Bugaeva compares this construction with Japanese soto no kankei, an external semantic relation between clause and noun Bugaeva (2012: 480). “External relation” here describes that relationship; it is not a claim that the construction is an ordinary externally headed gap relative.
Nakagawa makes a related distinction through argument structure. His hekattar tura sinot=an ‘I play with the children’ is internally complete. Adding hi can make it a complement, whereas adding cise ‘house’ alone cannot make a relative meaning ‘the house where I play with the children’ Nakagawa (2024: 507–508). The latter requires the locative relation to be expressed. These are distinct grammatical uses of material before a noun.
104.4 Dal Corso's incorporation analysis
Dal Corso studies a narrower set of southern Hokkaido sensory-evidential constructions. He distinguishes pseudo-incorporation, morphological incorporation, and classificatory incorporation. His pseudo-incorporation analysis allows some syntactic independence: in one example, i-os ‘behind us’ intervenes between aynu ek hum and as Dal Corso (2020: 58–60, example 19).
Possessive morphology alone does not distinguish all these patterns. The paper allows possessive marking in some incorporated or pseudo-incorporated sensory forms and relies on their syntax as well. This proposal addresses sensory predicates; Satō's lexical quasi-incorporation and Tamura's 連他動詞 concern the constructional problems discussed in Chapter 90 (Incorporation, Quasi-Incorporation, and Word Structure).
In classificatory incorporation, an incorporated sensory noun has an additional, syntactically unbound copy. Dal Corso illustrates haw-e before haw-as, and reports only three examples of this pattern in his reference corpora Dal Corso (2020: 62, example 21).
104.5 The internally headed proposal and its limits
‘From inside the grave someone seemed to be crying, and that voice was like this…’
Dal Corso 2020: 63; Example 22, citing Kayano 6-3,3
The segmentation follows Dal Corso's analysis. A copy of hawe follows the sensory predicate hawe-as, and ene an hi introduces the continuation.
Dal Corso proposes that the later hawe in this pattern is an internally positioned relative head. He derives the construction from one containing an unbound copy of the incorporated noun, then analyzes the head as displaced to the right edge while remaining inside the relative clause Dal Corso (2020: 63–65).
He explicitly leaves its position relative to a verb phrase unresolved, because the required analysis of Ainu VP structure is not established. He also says that the available constructions do not provide consistent evidence for a secure historical sequence Dal Corso (2020: 64–66). The proposal supplies an account of these copied-noun patterns; its scope does not extend automatically to every sensory complement or every clause with a general nominal head.
References cited in this chapter
Bugaeva (2012) ·Bugaeva (2015) ·Dal Corso (2020) ·Nakagawa (2024)