Chapter 138Narrative Continuation and Repetition
Connective formal nouns, orowa expressions, recapitulation and reference, and attributed analyses of narrative boundaries.
138.1 Continuing a narrative
Ainu narratives connect situations through particles, formal-noun constructions, adverbial expressions, and repeated information. Hine can link an introductory description to further events, while hike presents a preceding situation as the background for what follows Nakagawa (2024: 338, 516).
‘I was living with my older sister, and she kept crying, …’
Nakagawa 2024: 516; Saru, Example 1185
The fourth-person construction refers to the narrator. The repeated cis a cis a depicts continued crying, and the source excerpt remains open after kor.
Nakagawa distinguishes this connective hike from a nominal hike that occupies an argument position in the following predicate. He makes the same distinction for linking uses of p/pe Nakagawa (2024: 515–516, examples 1182–1185). A recurring word shape can therefore have different structural roles.
138.2 Orowa and related connective expressions
Orowa, orowano, ora, and related forms can follow an apparent sentence ending or another connector. Nakagawa illustrates ora after kusu and orowano after hine within one account of buying seeds and arranging a box for planting Nakagawa (2024: 517, example 1187).
Tamura describes these forms as often signalling that the speaker will continue, while allowing time to formulate the next words. They can also have a temporal sense such as ‘from that time’ Tamura (1997: 34–35). Nakagawa likewise records hi orano and hi orowano with ‘since’ meanings Nakagawa (2024: 517, example 1188). Their presence alone does not identify the scale of a scene change.
138.3 Repetition and reference
Dal Corso examines a passage about a woman who raises her son, sees him marry, and then unexpectedly becomes blind. The narrative revisits the upbringing and marriage before describing the three people living together Dal Corso (2018: 196–198, §6.3, example 170; TMA:2).
‘I had raised my son, but … my son married and we all lived together, but …’
Dal Corso 2018: 197; Hokkaido (dialect not further specified), Example 170, recapitulation excerpt; source siglum TMA:2
TMA:2 is Tamura 1984:2, Audio Materials of Ainu 1, cited through Dal Corso. Person boundaries and glosses are adapted to this grammar. PFV follows the disclosed convention in chapter 111; Dal Corso uses PRF in this passage. The following clause says that the woman suddenly became completely blind.
Dal Corso interprets the repetition as clarification: the explicit mention of the son helps recover reference in the earlier account. He takes the final a p before the blindness as a boundary introducing a turn in events Dal Corso (2018: 197–198). This is an analysis of a particular passage. It does not establish an obligatory pattern in which every narrative segment repeats the end of the previous one.
138.4 Changes of scene, topic, and actor
Yoshikawa describes a broader tendency for a with p, korka, or wa to occur where a story changes scene, topic, or actor. One example moves from the narrator's upbringing by a grandfather to growing older and noticing something; another includes a change of actor Yoshikawa (2022: §4.1.1, examples 34–36).
Yoshikawa relates this tendency to her perfective analysis of a, emphasizing the earlier situation's separation from the current one. That explanation belongs to the competing aspectual accounts in Chapter 111 (A, Rok, and Aan: Earlier Situations and Discovery). The narrative interpretation also depends on time expressions, lexical participants, and context; a connector by itself does not identify every shift in speaker, actor, or viewpoint.
References cited in this chapter
Dal Corso (2018) ·Nakagawa (2024) ·Tamura (1997) ·Yoshikawa (2022)