Chapter 107The kuni Complementizer and Purpose Complements

107.1 kuni in the complementizer system

The particle kuni nominalizes a finite VP into a nominal whose content is irrealis, prospective, or deontic — what the reporting subject expects, wishes, or presents as obligatory. It is a member of the small set of complementizers that take a saturated VP and make it the argument of a transitive matrix predicate, forming what Nakagawa calls the indirect-speech (間接話法) system Nakagawa (2024: 475–476). The complementizer yak marks the retrospective or ongoing counterpart; hi and p ~ pe nominalize without a temporal restriction Nakagawa (2024: 475–478); Satō (2008: 176–177). The closed class of formal nouns that includes p ~ pe is defined there; the arity arithmetic that separates complementizer from relative-clause use is developed in Chapter 101 (The Nominalizers -p/-pe and -i/-hi (Participant, Event, Place, Fact)).

Three construction types exploit kuni. Before ye ‘say’ or ramu ‘think’, it nominalizes a VP expressing what the reporting subject says will happen, believes should happen, or directs someone to do. Before the formal noun p ‘thing; (pejorative) person’, it yields a purposive or deontic nominal (kuni p). And before the copula ne ‘be’ directly, Classical Ainu data show an expectative predication meaning 'it must be that' or 'in order that' (kuni ne) Shibatani (1990: 83–84). These three are treated in the sections below.

Corpus search returns 6,113 tokens of kuni (rank 36), a figure that conflates the complementizer with any phonologically identical material and gives an upper bound on the construction's frequency.

107.2 The irrealis complement of ye and ramu

The matrix verbs that select kuni are ye ‘say’ and ramu ‘think’. Each member of the indirect-speech complementizer set marks the temporal or epistemic stance the reporting subject takes toward the reported content. kuni occupies the prospective end of the system: the embedded VP describes what will, should, or is wished to come about Nakagawa (2024: 476).

Two syntactic properties hold across all four members. Final particles of the main-clause type (na, ya, etc.) cannot appear inside the embedded clause; they are anchored to the speaker's own utterance, not to the reported one. And the referential perspective inside the embedded clause shifts from the speaker's to the reporting subject's: a first-person speaker becomes third or fourth person as the locus of predication Nakagawa (2024: 475). These properties confirm that each complementizer heads a nominal object: even yak, originally a conditional conjunctive, cannot be followed directly by an intransitive verb (*yak hawean 'that someone spoke' is ungrammatical as a standalone), because as a nominal it must be the transitive verb's object Nakagawa (2024: 475–476).

ramu 'think' selects the same kuni complement when the thinker's belief is prospective or deontic. The following illustration conforms to the pattern Nakagawa establishes Nakagawa (2024: 476):

The distinction between kuni and kunak within the prospective subsystem is the most discussed. Nakagawa assigns the directive reading exclusively to kuni: a command or instruction reported under ye takes kuni; the two forms are not freely interchangeable even in purely inferred contexts Nakagawa (2024: 476–477) ‹corpus-suggested›. The kuni / yak contrast is cleaner: the pair divides prospective from retrospective content, mirroring a tense–modality divide in the reported proposition.

107.3 kuni p: purposive and deontic nominals

When kuni is followed by the formal noun p (allomorph pe after a consonant-final stem), the compound nominalizes the preceding VP and yields two related readings depending on how the head is construed: a purposive nominal 'thing to V / what is to be done', and a deontic or propositional nominal 'what will / must happen'. Both are well attested in the Saru corpus.

The purposive reading is clearest when kuni p denotes objects or activities defined by their intended function. Two parallel purposive nominals appear in a single clause:

The deontic or propositional reading appears when kuni p is itself predicated. Combination with the copula and the inferential formal noun ruwe yields the frame [VP] kuni p ne ruwe ne, which presents the VP-content as inevitable or obligatory and asserts it as established fact (see Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential)):

The four main patterns built on kuni, ranging from indirect speech through purposive nominal to the full epistemic deontic frame, are summarized in the following table Nakagawa (2024: 476); Bugaeva (2016: 294):

The p of kuni p is the same formal noun treated in Chapter 101 (The Nominalizers -p/-pe and -i/-hi (Participant, Event, Place, Fact)). Its arity (−1) closes a purposive clause with an open participant slot (purposive nominal reading) or nominalizes a saturated irrealis clause as a whole (deontic reading). The complement-taking predicates that select these nominals are discussed in Chapter 106 (Nominalized Complements and Control/Raising); the overlap with the deontic modal domain in Chapter 118 (Deontic Necessity and Obligation (kuni ne, kus ne)).

107.4 kuni ne: expectative predication

Shibatani groups kuni followed directly by the copula ne alongside the other formal-noun-plus-copula modal expressions (ruwe ne, siri ne, hawe ne, humi ne) under the label "expectative mood". The form yields two readings in his Classical Ainu data: an epistemic 'it must be that [VP]' and a purposive 'in order that [VP]' Shibatani (1990: 83–84).

On this account, kuni itself functions as a formal-noun-like head nominalizing the preceding VP; the copula predicates that nominalization. The two readings correspond directly to the deontic and purposive readings of kuni p ne, where the additional formal noun p is present between kuni and the copula. Whether bare kuni ne and kuni p ne are diachronically related variants or a single construction with optionally present p is not settled by the sources read here ‹speculative›.

Shibatani's data are from Classical epic Ainu (yukar traditions of the Itadori and Ishikari areas). No read source provides modern Saru or Chitose corpus examples of bare kuni ne without the intervening p; the banked Saru corpus examples above all show the kuni p ne form. Nakagawa's grammar, based on modern Saru and Chitose, records kuni p ne ruwe ne as the productive frame Nakagawa (2024: 476).

The formal-noun-plus-copula paradigm underlying both constructions connects kuni to the evidential system: Nakagawa observes that clause-final evidential phrases (ruwe ne, siri ne, etc.) constitute one type of complementizer applied to a main clause, and kuni participates in the same nominal architecture Nakagawa (2024: 508). The full paradigm is set out in Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema). Purpose clauses built on kuni in adverbial position are treated in Chapter 136 (Causal and Purpose Clauses (kusu)).

107.5 Morphological status and open questions

Two analyses of kuni appear in the literature and make different predictions about its internal structure. Nakagawa treats it as a conjunctive particle (接続助詞) with formal-noun-like behavior (形式名詞的な用法) — a free form that nominalizes the preceding VP and feeds it to a transitive matrix predicate, on the same footing as yak and kunak Nakagawa (2024: 476). On this analysis, kuni p is a sequence of two free forms: the particle kuni followed by the formal noun p.

Bugaeva's morphological analysis decomposes kuni-p as kun-i-p — an obligation-related root kun- (semantics uncertain), a possessive suffix -i, and the nominalizer -p — yielding a deontic head meaning 'the thing that must be done', without necessarily treating kuni and p as syntactically separate Bugaeva (2016: 294) ‹contested›. The lexical source of the root kun- remains unverified.

The broader constituency question — whether kuni p ne ruwe ne is biclausal (a nominalizing particle and formal noun heading the preceding clause, closed by the copula) or is grammaticalizing toward a monoclausal complex predicate — runs parallel to the same debate for the evidential frame ruwe ne, discussed in Chapter 101 (The Nominalizers -p/-pe and -i/-hi (Participant, Event, Place, Fact)) and Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential). No read source provides a constituency test that decides between them for the kuni construction specifically ‹contested› Nakagawa (2024: 476); Bugaeva (2016: 294).

Shibatani's Classical data add a historical dimension: his "expectative mood" label groups kuni ne with the possessed sensory-noun heads, suggesting the formal-noun-like behavior Nakagawa observes reflects a partly grammaticalized noun origin — the same diachronic cline by which ruwe, siri, and hawe moved from sensory nouns to nominalization heads Shibatani (1990: 83–84) ‹speculative›.