Chapter 102Lexical Heads and Formal-Noun Nominalization

102.1 Heads, nominalizers, and their meanings

A clause before a noun can identify the noun's referent or supply its content. The head may be an ordinary lexical noun, a general noun such as kur ‘person’, or a dependent form such as hi. Authors divide the latter group differently. Satō distinguishes relative heads from whole-clause nominalizers; Nakagawa treats membership in the formal-noun class separately from the function of a particular occurrence Satō (2008: 175–180)Nakagawa (2024: 508–510).

The table summarizes uses described by Satō and Nakagawa; it does not assign every function to every form Satō (2008: 175–180)Nakagawa (2024: 507–513). Chapter 101 (P and Pe: Participants, Content, and Clause Endings) develops the participant–content distinction for p/pe.

102.2 Hi: content, time, and place

The pronunciation i varies by description and variety. Satō says that hi can lose its initial consonant after a consonant Satō (2008: 175). Refsing also records loss after vowels in rapid speech Refsing (1986: 260), while Takahashi treats Tokachi hi/i as free variants Takahashi (2014: 151, note 4).

Place interpretations often require an overt relation to the action. Citing Okuda, Nakagawa contrasts oro ta cise kar hi ‘the place where a house was built’ with temporal pon=an hi wano ‘since I was small’. The place construction retains oro ta ‘there’; the time construction does not. He also records exceptions, including Horobetsu seta utar osoma hi ‘the dogs’ latrine’, without that locative phrase Nakagawa (2024: 511–512, citing Okuda 1989:63 and Chiri Yukie).

102.3 Place heads usi and uske

Usi and uske occur as relative heads and as complement markers in Nakagawa's account Nakagawa (2024: 509–510). Their place-related meaning does not by itself remove the grammatical relation inside a relative clause. Bugaeva's Chitose eun a=nu usi ka isam ‘there was nowhere I could ask about it’ retains eun, expressing the place or source toward which the inquiry is directed Bugaeva (2015: 49, example 16, quoting Bugaeva 2004:390).

102.4 Sensory nouns and clause complements

Nakagawa documents four concept–affiliative pairs: ru/ruwe ‘path, trace’, haw/hawe ‘voice’, sir/siri ‘appearance’, and hum/humi ‘sound, sensation’ Nakagawa (2024: 259, table 66). This morphological relationship concerns these particular nouns. Formal nouns as a whole do not share one uniform possessive paradigm.

These forms can head ordinary complements of perception or evaluation predicates. Nakagawa's cis hawe a=nu means ‘I heard crying’, and his next example uses humi for the sound of a mother tending the fire and cooking Nakagawa (2024: 509, examples 1168–1169). The sensory head contributes to what is perceived, even when no sentence-final ne follows it.

Satō suggests a connection between these affiliative forms and knowledge or experience already available in the situation or discourse. He presents this as a tentative explanation Satō (2008: 135). The interpretation of complete evidential endings, and the competing accounts of their structure, are discussed in Chapter 100 (Copular Negation and Clause Endings).

102.5 Conventional words and productive phrases

Bugaeva gives lexical nominalizations ci=ronnu-p ‘fox’, analyzed as ‘what we kill’, and ape-o-i ‘hearth’, analyzed as ‘place where fire enters’ Bugaeva (2016: 100, examples 5a–b). Her analysis retains the first-person exclusive plural actor in the former and the plural root ronnu. Such conventional words must be distinguished from phrases assembled to identify a particular referent.

Nakagawa contrasts the compound tureptani ‘lily-digging stick’ with nea menoko ani turepta ni ‘the stick with which that woman dug lilies’. He analyzes the compound as turepta plus ni, with turep ‘lily’ already incorporated in turepta. The full relative phrase requires instrumental ani Nakagawa (2024: 506). A conventional compound and an identifying relative clause can therefore differ in their internal grammatical relations.

102.6 Independent endings and adverbial clauses

A nominalizing form can develop uses outside an ordinary noun phrase. Takahashi examines Tokachi independent clauses ending in ru, (h)aw, or (h)i, using the term insubordination. He also notes that distinguishing this analysis from omission of a main clause requires further work Takahashi (2014: 151–154).

In a separate study, Takahashi describes all four sensory nominalizers in Horobetsu adverbial clauses and argues that their evidential distinctions remain relevant there Takahashi (2018: 108–112). This clause-linking development and the Tokachi independent endings represent different extensions. Neither establishes that every formal noun can freely terminate an independent clause throughout Hokkaido.