Chapter 148Interjections, Response Words, Ideophones, and Sound Symbolism

148.1 Word-class status

Interjections (間投詞) occupy the most peripheral position in Hokkaido Ainu's part-of-speech system. The diagnostic is syntactic: an interjection enters no grammatical relation with any other clause element and constitutes a complete utterance by itself Nakagawa (2024: 290); Satō (2008: 2–3). This separates them from adverbs, which share the arity-zero slot but modify a VP, and from particles, which attach to an autonomous element. The six-class system and its diagnostics are laid out in Chapter 33 (The Word-Class Inventory and the Noun/Verb Bipartition).

Refsing, working on Shizunai, treated interjections as a member of a single nominal macro-class together with conjunctions and adverbs, rather than as an independent class Refsing (1986: 74, 76). Nakagawa and Satō reject the lumping: adverbs and conjunctions enter syntactic relations; canonical interjections do not Nakagawa (2024: 290). The categories do, however, grade into each other at the margin — directive words like hetak and hokure can immediately precede an imperative verb, functioning as manner adverbs, while retaining their classification as interjections in Nakagawa's analysis ‹contested› Nakagawa (2024: 292).

The class is large and heavily dialect-specific: the same expressive domain may be covered by phonologically unrelated forms in different Hokkaido varieties, and many items have no straightforward equivalents across dialects Nakagawa (2024: 290–292).

148.2 The interjection inventory

Nakagawa organises the inventory under three functional types: response words, calls, and emotion expressions Nakagawa (2024: 290–293). The following table synthesizes the forms attested in the best-documented Hokkaido varieties, drawing on Nakagawa and Tamura for Saru Nakagawa (2024: 290–293); Tamura (1996), and the pedagogical grammar of Ijäs for the broader revitalization inventory Ijäs (2023).

The two response words e and ho are distinguished by their discourse trigger: e responds to a proposition (assent), while ho responds to a direct call or address. Both are monomorphemic and stand alone as complete utterances.

148.3 Greeting formulae and their morphological structure

irankarapte ‘greetings’ is the pan-Hokkaido greeting formula in the modern documentary record and is the form standard in revitalization pedagogy Nakagawa (2024: 290–291); Ijäs (2023). The Shizunai variety uses ikatay in the same function; community discussion reports that Asahikawa speakers use a phonologically distinct greeting not shared by southern varieties (palestine_2026, aynu-corpora Discord, 2025-09-22, asserted; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)). This strong dialect-specificity in the expressive vocabulary extends to the whole interjection class Nakagawa (2024: 290).

The morphological structure of irankarapte is not decomposed in the descriptive grammars consulted, which treat it as a frozen formula. A community analysis proposes i=rankarap-te, applying an i=…-te causative construction to the verb rankarap 'approach, greet formally', yielding something like 'let me greet you / the act of greeting' (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-25; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹contested›. The same analysis is proposed for iyairaykere ‘thank you (formal)’ as i=yairayke-re from yairayke ‘be grateful’, analogous to the pattern 'the thing one ought to be grateful for' — a parallel noted there with English excited / exciting ‹contested›. Neither proposal has been tested against corpus attestations of the component morphemes, and they are best treated as working hypotheses.

Among the thank-you forms, a pragmatic scale runs from informal to formal. Community discussion documents the Saru hierarchy as: hioy'oy — a light acknowledgment appropriate for ordinary exchanges — is less formal than hinna (lower-stream Saru hunna), which in turn is reinforced by reduplicated hinna hinna for greater warmth, with iyayiraykere as the most formal register expression (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-12-26, asserted; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹corpus-suggested›. The form hinna is specifically associated with women's speech and accompanies the gesture raymik (touching the index finger beneath the nose) when receiving gifts or food; the corresponding male gesture is onkami (both hands). The gender-register conditioning of these forms is treated in Chapter 145 (Gendered Speech and Pragmatic Registers).

The affirmative response word in dialogue is typically the bare assent particle e, but the reduced formal-noun form ruwe appears in some spoken contexts as a compact affirmative response — a final-particle use of the same element that heads the inferential evidential construction. Its relation to the full evidential predicate is treated in Chapter 35 (The Formal / Defective Noun Set (ruwe, hawe, siri, humi, hi, pe, kur)).

148.4 Directive and affective interjections

hetak ‘hurry; quickly’ and hokure ‘come on; get going’ are directive interjections urging speed or movement Nakagawa (2024: 292). Both appear most commonly as standalone utterances, but hetak can also precede an imperative verb, where it functions as a manner adverb rather than as a pure interjection. Old documentary sources include sequences interpretable as hetak ek 'come quickly' and hetak hosipi 'go home quickly', where hetak modifies the following imperative (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-24, proposed; aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026)) ‹contested›.

The animal call coco — used to summon a dog — is phonologically stable across the documented Hokkaido varieties Nakagawa (2024: 292). Its CVCV shape is shared with the reduplicative mimetics discussed in the following section, though no etymological connection is documented ‹speculative›.

148.5 Ideophones and reduplicative mimetics

A small set of nouns encodes inherent plurality or collective multiplicity through reduplication — what Kindaichi and Chiri's grammar calls 疊語法 (reduplicative word formation). The following inventory is drawn from their survey of Hokkaido forms Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 31).

These are nouns, not adverbs or particles; they occur as arguments of the verb rather than as depictive adjuncts. Their shared morphological character — a CVC(V) base doubled to form a disyllabic or tetrasyllabic whole — encodes the dispersed or multiple nature of the referent: twigs as opposed to a single branch, hailstones as a mass, intestines as a coiled plurality. Kindaichi and Chiri note that some inherently-plural nouns of this kind trigger a plural verb form in the governing predicate, though the reduplicative noun itself carries no obligatory agreement marking Kindaichi & Chiri (1936: 31). The cross-chapter treatment of reduplication phonology — including the templates, base-copy processes, and their interaction with morphophonological sandhi — is in Chapter 32 (Reduplication Phonology and Rule Interaction).

These lexically closed reduplicative nouns are distinct from two other reduplication phenomena in the language: verbal reduplication, which encodes iterativity or distributive plurality (see Chapter 32 (Reduplication Phonology and Rule Interaction)), and pragmatic intensification by repetition of an interjection or adverb (as in hinna hinna above). The reduplicative nouns do not extend to new bases by productive rule; they are individually listed in dictionaries rather than derived by a synchronic morphological operation Tamura (1996); Nakagawa (2024: 264–265).

148.6 Sound symbolism: patterns and limits of the evidence

Whether Hokkaido Ainu has a productive phonesthemic system — systematic associations between phonological shape and semantic value, of the kind extensively described for Japanese and Korean — cannot be established from the descriptive literature accessible for this grammar. The reduplicative nouns show that the language uses phonological form to encode distributed plurality and collectivity, but whether the individual consonant or vowel choices within those forms carry meaning independently of the reduplication is not demonstrated by any primary source consulted ‹speculative›.

The closest approximation to size or intensity gradation in the available data is pragmatic intensification through repetition: the scale hioy'oy < hinna < hinna hinna represents gradient expressiveness through reduplication of the base form rather than through vowel or consonant substitution aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹corpus-suggested›. The adverb inventory includes words with degree-sensitive semantics (Chapter 146 (Adverbs, Degree Words, and Comparison Strategies)), but no primary source analyses these as phonesthemic.

Ideophones and formulaic refrain syllables in oral poetry — the ritual repetition units of kamuy yukar and the formulaic diction of uwepeker — constitute a distinct expressive register that intersects with this chapter's topic. Their analysis as a poetic and ritual phenomenon belongs to Chapter 153 (The Elevated/Poetic Register: Archaic Morphology and Formulaic Diction).

148.7 Morphosyntactic integration

Canonical interjections integrate into discourse by standing outside clause structure entirely; they do not head a predicate, fill an argument position, or modify a noun or VP. Mimetic words, when used depictively, can integrate at three positions.

The most common integration is the adverbial slot (arity zero): a mimetic word appears immediately before the verb it qualifies, in the same position as a common adverb. The adverb class and its arity-zero definition are set out in Chapter 146 (Adverbs, Degree Words, and Comparison Strategies). Manner adverbs like moyre ‘slowly, softly’, tunas ‘immediately’, and tuyma ‘far away’ show that the preverbal modifier slot is productive for motion- and manner-qualifying expressions Nakagawa (2024: 273–282).

A second strategy uses the quotative postposition sekor ‘thus; saying (quotative)’ followed by a light verb, typically ki ‘do’. The construction [depictive] sekor ki predicts a depicted action or produced sound as something 'thus performed': the depictive content is quoted under sekor and then asserted through the light verb. This is the Ainu quotative frame analysed in Chapter 105 (Quotative Complementation and Reported Speech (sekor)); its applicability to sound-depicting content specifically rests on limited corpus evidence Nakagawa (2024: 280) ‹corpus-suggested›.

The third strategy embeds an ideophonic content in the standard nominalization apparatus — under a formal noun like pe ‘thing, one’ or hi ‘thing, fact, time’ — and then uses the nominalized clause as a clause argument. This integration route is not specific to ideophones and does not mark depictive status specially; it is shared with all clause types. The formal-noun complement system is described in Chapter 35 (The Formal / Defective Noun Set (ruwe, hawe, siri, humi, hi, pe, kur)).