Chapter 146Adverbs, Degree Words, and Comparison Strategies

146.1 The adverb class

Hokkaido Ainu adverbs modify verb phrases, carry arity zero — they neither serve as predicate heads nor fill argument slots — and take no nominative person prefix Nakagawa (2024: 273); Nakagawa (2022: 473). The class boundary with prenominals (連体詞) turns on target: adverbs attach to the VP, prenominals to the NP, and prenominals additionally bear no person prefix of any kind Nakagawa (2024: 116). Postpositional adverbs form a subclass that co-indexes a nominal antecedent; when that antecedent is pronominal the postpositional adverb receives an objective person prefix — a morphological signature shared with locative nouns and distinct from verbal person inflection Nakagawa (2024: 273, 280).

Because this grammar assigns no adjective class to property-concept words — treating them as stative intransitive verbs (see Chapter 99 (Property-Concept (Adjectival) Predication without a Copula)) — the adverb–verb boundary matters directly for the description of manner and degree. A property verb such as pirka ‘be good, be well’ predicates with full person marking; the deadverbal form pirka-no 'well, nicely' derived from it carries arity zero and no person affix. Kindaichi, who did posit an adjective class, treated these same forms as adjective-derived adverbials Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 123–124); in the modern analysis the derivation is uniform verb → adverb Nakagawa (2022: 474).

Nakagawa identifies five formation routes for adverbs proper, plus a distinct postpositional subclass treated below Nakagawa (2024: 273–282). The five are: (i) basic/lexical adverbs (本来型); (ii) intransitive verb + the suffix -no ‘adverbializer’; (iii) bare intransitive conversion; (iv) transitive verb conversion; and (v) directional formations built on locative roots with pronominal prefixes and directional suffixes. The full account of the -no ‘adverbializer’ suffix belongs to Chapter 61 (The Adverbializer -no and Adverb Formation from Verbs); the present chapter surveys its output alongside the other types, then the degree and comparison systems.

Satō additionally distinguishes a demonstrative adverb subtype (指示副詞) and an interrogative subtype (疑問副詞) alongside the basic and postpositional divisions Satō (2008: 2); Nakagawa subsumes both into the basic and prenominal classes respectively Nakagawa (2024: 273). Refsing, working on Shizunai, groups adverbs with conjunctions and interjections in a single particle category Refsing (1986: 74–76) ‹contested›. Nakagawa and Satō instead distribute conjunctive-meaning items between conjunctive particles (接続助詞) and adverbs, leaving no independent conjunction class Nakagawa (2024: 116–117); Satō (2008: 3).

146.2 Lexical adverbs

Basic lexical adverbs form a closed set spanning temporal, degree, and modal functions. Nakagawa's Saru–Chitose inventory includes the members below Nakagawa (2024: 273); the degree/superlative member iyotta ‘most of all, above all’ is attested in Tamura's Saru dictionary and recurs throughout the oral corpus Tamura (1996: s.v. iyotta):

The degree adverbs sonno ‘truly’ and sino ‘truly’ are cross-class items: both also function as general prenominals meaning 'real, true' when preceding a noun phrase (sonno menoko 'a real woman') Nakagawa (2024: 283). Used adverbially, sonno ‘truly’ scopes over the entire clause:

The negators somo ‘not’ and iteki ‘do not’ differ syntactically. somo ‘not’ is the standard clausal negator (treated in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo)); iteki ‘do not’ operates in the prohibitive domain covered by Chapter 130 (The Prohibitive Subsystem: iteki and Negative Directives). A community-observed distinction further separates the adverb ikiya ‘be careful not to, lest’, which licenses normal person marking on its complement clause (ikiya seta e=na 'be careful not to bite the dog'), from iteki ‘do not’, which interacts differently with the following verbal complex and its person-prefix slot (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord 2025; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹contested›.

The adverb patek ‘only, just’ provides an instructive contrast with Japanese だけ: patek ‘only’ patterns as a pure adverb and cannot head a nominal phrase, whereas Japanese だけ is a grammaticalized noun. Community corpus analysis records the traditional order ani patek 'with only this' in classical texts (one token against zero of the reversed patek ani), with near-equal counts of both orders in modern learner material; the reversal is attributed to nominal influence from Japanese (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord 2024; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹corpus-suggested›.

146.3 Deverbal adverbs: the -no adverbializer and bare conversion

The suffix -no ‘adverbializer’ attaches to intransitive verbs — most productively to property verbs — to derive manner and degree adverbs: pirka ‘be good’ → pirka-no 'well, nicely'; moyre ‘be gentle, be slow’ → moyre-no 'gently, slowly'; tunas ‘be quick’ → tunas-no 'quickly'. The resulting forms are adverbs with arity zero and no person affix. Ijäs introduces the most frequent outputs in her pedagogical grammar Ijäs (2023); the phonological details of the suffix, the relationship to the variant -nu ‘adverbializer variant’, and the depictive and resultative readings of -no adverbials belong to Chapter 61 (The Adverbializer -no and Adverb Formation from Verbs). The direct consequence for degree is that any property verb can furnish a degree adverb without the property-word becoming a distinct category:

A second group of intransitive verbs converts to adverbs without any suffix. The most frequently attested members of this bare-conversion pattern are tunas ‘be quick; quickly’, moyre ‘be gentle; gently’, hanke ‘be near; nearby’, and tuyma ‘be far; far away’ Nakagawa (2024: 273). Bare and -no forms often co-occur in the same dialect without semantic contrast; the choice may reflect prosodic context or register ‹corpus-suggested›.

Transitive verb conversion produces a third group, whose members surface mainly as postpositional adverbs (e.g., ani ‘with, by means of’, tura(no) ‘together with’) and are documented in the following section Nakagawa (2024: 280–281). Directional adverbs derived from locative roots are treated immediately below.

146.4 Postpositional adverbs

Postpositional adverbs (後置副詞) take a nominal antecedent — typically the immediately preceding NP — and carry the objective person prefix when the antecedent is pronominal Nakagawa (2024: 280). Two diagnostics distinguish them from case postpositions: they can stand independently at the head of a clause, and they do not require a 〈place〉-marked antecedent, unlike the locative case particles ta ‘LOC (at, in)’, wa ‘ABL (from)’, and peka ‘PERL (through)’ Nakagawa (2024: 281–282). Compare: ruyka kari 'across the bridge' (postpositional adverb kari ‘through, across’ with a bare noun antecedent; no 〈place〉 required) vs riyopa or peka (the perlative case particle peka ‘PERL (through)’ requires the 〈place〉-marked locative noun or ‘inside, place of’) Nakagawa (2024: 281–282).

Nakagawa divides postpositional adverbs into two formation types: a basic (本来型, 表70) and a transitive-verb-conversion type (他動詞転換型, 表71) Nakagawa (2024: 280–281). The member pak(no) ‘until, to the extent that’ of the basic type builds the degree clauses treated in Chapter 137 (Manner and Degree Adverbial Clauses); akkari ‘more than, exceeding’ of the conversion type serves as the standard-of-comparison marker (see comparison section below):

With a pronominal antecedent, the objective prefix attaches to the postpositional adverb: en=akkari 'more than me', en=sam 'beside me', un=koraci 'like us'. The same en= / un= series that marks objects of transitive verbs appears here, confirming the objective rather than nominative slot Nakagawa (2024: 280–281). With a noun antecedent the noun simply precedes without marking: seta koraci 'like a dog'.

146.5 Degree and intensification

Degree in Hokkaido Ainu is expressed through lexical degree adverbs, through property verbs themselves (which predicate directly as intransitives), and in some contexts through reduplication. The lexical degree adverbs sonno ‘truly, really’ and earkinne ‘very, extremely’ precede the modified predicate exactly as manner adverbs do: sonno poro 'truly big / really large', earkinne pirka 'very beautiful' Nakagawa (2024: 273).

At the lower end of degree, pon ‘be small’ — a stative property verb meaning 'be small' — is used prenominally (pon hekaci 'small child', Nakagawa (2022: 475)) and, in its adverbial bare-conversion use, as a diminutive degree modifier meaning 'a little, slightly' ‹corpus-suggested›. Its logical counterpart in the degree domain is poro ‘be big, be great’, which in composition and derivation conveys augmentative force; neither is a bound degree morpheme.

Reduplication of property verbs and ideophonic forms yields intensified or expressive degree readings — the patterns are analysed together with the broader reduplication system in Chapter 32 (Reduplication Phonology and Rule Interaction).

The superlative degree adverb iyotta ‘most of all, above all’ immediately precedes the modified property predicate: iyotta tanne 'the longest', iyotta pirka 'the most beautiful' Tamura (1996: s.v. iyotta). No comparative morpheme competes for this slot, so iyotta bears the superlative function without formal ambiguity with a comparative form.

146.6 Comparison: the akkari strategy and the absence of a morphological comparative

Hokkaido Ainu has no dedicated comparative morpheme — no suffix or particle whose sole function is to inflect a property predicate for comparison. The analysis follows directly from the no-adjective-class thesis: because property-concept words are intransitive verbs, they carry no adjectival inflection and therefore no comparative inflection Nakagawa (2024: 118); Nakagawa (2022: 474). In Stassen's cross-linguistic survey of comparison strategies (Stassen 1997), this places Ainu in the large type that expresses comparison via a separate particle or postpositional element rather than by morphological marking on the predicate.

The primary comparison construction uses the postpositional adverb akkari ‘more than, exceeding’ (表71 above) as the standard-of-comparison marker. The standard NP immediately precedes akkari ‘more than’; when the standard is pronominal, the objective prefix attaches to akkari ‘more than’ in the usual postpositional pattern:

akkari ‘more than’ carries the full comparative meaning; the property verb itself (poro ‘be big’, tanne ‘be long’, etc.) is unchanged from its predicative form. Comparison is thus encoded entirely in the postpositional layer rather than in predicate morphology.

For equative comparison ('as … as'), the postpositional adverbs koraci ‘like, in the manner of’ and neno ‘like’ (basic type, 表70) serve as the standard marker: seta koraci poro 'as big as a dog' Nakagawa (2024: 280). The overlap between the equative 'as … as' and the manner 'like' reading of koraci ‘like’ is common in languages that use manner adverbs for equative comparison, and has not been distinguished as a formal ambiguity in the sources read for this chapter ‹speculative›. Degree and extent comparison using pak(no) ‘until, to the extent that’ — yielding proportional and scalar clauses — is treated in Chapter 137 (Manner and Degree Adverbial Clauses).

Juxtaposition without an explicit standard marker also operates as a comparison strategy in discourse contexts where the contrasted entities have been introduced: two property predicates in adjacent clauses can be read as comparative without any occurrence of akkari ‘more than’ ‹corpus-suggested›. Its pragmatic frequency relative to the akkari ‘more than’ construction has not been quantified from the sources read for this chapter.