Chapter 95Oblique and Adjunct Syntax; Verbless and Presentational Clauses

95.1 The predicate slot is invariably verbal

Hokkaido Ainu has essentially no verbless predication at the structural level. As Nakagawa states in the Handbook chapter on parts of speech, "the element that occupies the predicate position in Ainu is invariably a verb phrase and the head of the verb phrase is a verb or an auxiliary verb" Nakagawa (2022: 474). A bare nominal or oblique phrase cannot stand as the main predicate of a sentence. What looks verbless in discourse is always one of four things: an ambient verb with an incorporated nominal root and no overt subject; an insubordinated formal-noun clause reduced to its nominalizer; a vocative or exclamative fragment that is not a predication at all; or genuine ellipsis of a recoverable predicate under discourse conditions that license it. These are the phenomena organized in this chapter. The three productive structural predicate types — copular, existential/locational, and property-concept — are treated in Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses), Chapter 97 (Existential and Locational Clauses (an / oka)), and Chapter 99 (Property-Concept (Adjectival) Predication without a Copula) respectively; the present chapter maps their borders.

95.2 Ambient predicates: the 0-place (完全動詞) verb class

The nearest Ainu equivalent to an 'impersonal' or 'ambient' clause is the zero-place verb (完全動詞), in which a nominal root is incorporated into an existential or posture verb to form a word that predicates an ambient state with no subject slot and no person indexing Nakagawa (2024: 126–128); Satō (2008: 21); Shibatani (1990: 19). The most transparent example is mean ‘be cold (of weather)’, etymologically me ‘coldness’ + the existential an ‘exist’ — 'coldness exists' — which Shibatani explicitly analyses as noun incorporation Shibatani (1990: 19). The same sir ‘scene, weather, land’ root combines with property verbs to make weather predicates: sirpirka ‘be fine weather’ (= sir⁠-pirka ‘be good’), sirsesek ‘be hot (weather)’ (= sir⁠-sesek ‘be hot’), sirkunne ‘become dark, night falls’ (= sir⁠-kunne ‘be dark’). The posture verb as ‘stand’ forms the parallel 'voice' ambient: hawas ‘there is a sound, it is said’ (= haw ‘voice’⁠-as).

The grammar-diagnostic pair is the contrast between a 0-place ambient and a 1-place experiential verb with the same root. mean ‘be cold (of weather)’ 'the weather is cold' takes no person affix and no subject, while merayke ‘feel cold’ 'feel cold' takes the standard intransitive subject index:

The parallel 0-place / 1-place split holds for hawas 'there is a sound' vs hawean ‘say’ 'X says'; a single nominal root surfaces in both, but the 0-place member predicates an ambient event in the scene, while the 1-place member requires an indexed agent-experiencer Nakagawa (2024: 127–128). The zero-place class is small and largely lexicalized (weather, atmospheric light, acoustic ambiance); productivity is limited Nakagawa (2024: 126). The noun-incorporation mechanism that creates them is treated in Chapter 88 (Object (Patient) Noun Incorporation); the existential an in the aspect-auxiliary role is treated in Chapter 110 (The Existential-Aspect System: kor an Progressive and wa an Resultative-Perfect).

95.3 Oblique adjuncts and the locational predicate gap

There is no clause type in Hokkaido Ainu in which a bare oblique phrase — a postpositional phrase, a locational NP, a temporal adverb — functions as the predicate of a main clause. Nakagawa's clause-constituent analysis (§10.1) treats adverbs, case-marked NPs, and postpositional adverbs uniformly as adjuncts on the verb phrase, never predicate heads Nakagawa (2024: 359–361). Refsing states the complementary positive requirement: locational and existential meanings are expressed with the existential verb, not with a bare PP — she lists no 'locational copula' type separate from an/oka(y) in the Shizunai grammar Refsing (1986: 272–273).

The practical consequence is that a Japanese-style bare 'topic–locative' sentence (トキヨには大きな家が多い) is dispreferred in Ainu: the intransitive existential an cannot take a bare second NP because it is strictly one-argument. The natural pattern marks the location as an oblique with or ta 'in the place of' (or bare ta), leaving the existential as the predicate head Satō (2008: 3–4). The community discussion of this constraint, confirmed against Satō's account, gives the rule concisely: an is intransitive, so the frame is A B or ta an 'A is at B', while the transitive un ‘be at (transitive locative)’ licenses a bare nominal complement A B un without or ta aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-09, confirmed against Satō (2008: 3–4)) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

Because obliques never head a predicate, a phrase like kotan ta 'in the village' requires an or oka to form a complete predication: kotan ta an 'is in the village', not bare *kotan ta. This parallels the constraint that the copula ne is needed for predicate-nominal clauses (a Japanese-style bare-nominal predicate is also excluded). In both cases the verbal head is obligatory, and what reads as a 'nominal predicate' or 'locational predicate' in English always has a verb beneath it.

95.4 Labelling, naming, and specificational uses of the copular frame

The copular frame A B ne serves not only to classify (see Chapter 96 (The Copula ne and Predicate-Nominal Clauses) for its full paradigm) but also to label and name referents in discourse. The specificational pattern — where a nominalized clause is the subject and a name or title is the complement — is particularly frequent in naming contexts and in traditional oral narrative when a deity or character is formally introduced. Nakagawa's example of this frame comes from the formal-noun-headed subject:

In this pattern the formal noun hawe 'voice, utterance' functions as the possessed-form nominalizer that packages the quotative clause as a referential NP, and the copula ne predicates identity between the subject and the named referent. This is not a separate construction from the ordinary copular clause; it is the same frame with a nominalized complement. The formal nouns that head these nominalized clauses are defined in Chapter 35 (The Formal / Defective Noun Set (ruwe, hawe, siri, humi, hi, pe, kur)); the quotative particle sekor belongs to the quotative complementation chapter.

The sekor a=ye hawe ne frame is also the canonical 'it is called X' formula for introducing traditional names of places, deities, and artefacts in oral narrative, functioning as a specificational-naming copular in the context of cultural transmission. The constituent structure — [[sekor a=ye] hawe] ne — keeps the copula ne as the single predicate head; there is no head-stacking and no verbless portion. The copula's person marking follows the standard transitive-subject set on the nominative argument (see the person-marking architecture chapter); the absence of an object person index on ne, despite its two-place semantics, is the diagnostic idiosyncrasy noted by Nakagawa: the complement NP takes no object affix on the copula Nakagawa (2024: 132).

95.5 Formal-noun fragments: polar questions, exclamatives, and answers

Nakagawa 2024 lays out a four-member paradigm for the sentence-final formal-noun frame, in which the choice of predicate after the nominalizer encodes illocutionary force Nakagawa (2024: 392–396). The declarative and content-question members take the copula ne and the existential an respectively (treated in the evidential chapters for Chapter 121 (ruwe ne — the Inferential / Visual-Trace Evidential), Chapter 122 (siri ne — the Direct-Perception / Situational Evidential), Chapter 123 (hawe ne — the Reportative / Hearsay Evidential), and Chapter 124 (humi ne — the Non-Visual Sensory Evidential)); what concerns this chapter is the reduction of that frame to a bare formal noun — without either ne or an — which functions as a polar question or exclamative:

The bare-nominalizer polar question is an instance of insubordination: a nominalized clause that would ordinarily be embedded under the copula or existential stands instead as a main clause, retaining the illocutionary force of a question or exclamation from prosodic and contextual cues rather than from any grammatical marker. The sentence e=eraman hawe? 'you understood?' is a polar question in Saru without the following ne or an Nakagawa (2024: 395, 409). The same shape can function as an exclamative — expressing surprise or emphatic assertion — again distinguished from the declarative only by intonation. Nakagawa notes the Saru reinforced form ruwe he an? (with the particle he and the existential) as a more explicit polar-question variant Nakagawa (2024: 395).

The affirmative-answer member NMLZ + un likewise reduces the declarative frame by replacing the copula with the final particle un, forming a minimally marked confirmation. The formal-noun head is retained, making the affirmative answer morphologically kin to the declarative without being one:

An additional bare-predicate use of isam functions as the full predicate of a content question in the corpus. Nakagawa's example shows isam, isam? 'it's gone, gone?' functioning as the rhetorical pivot of a question where the missing entity is already established in discourse:

These fragment-like patterns are not structurally verbless: the formal noun is nominalized from a full clause and the bare-NMLZ frame still has a verbal predicate implicit in the nominalization. Predicationally, the clause is complete; it is only the final copula or existential that is elided under the reduced illocutionary frames. This is therefore ellipsis at the right edge of the clause, conditioned by illocutionary force, rather than an absence of predication. The full treatment of the evidential paradigm and its illocutionary differentiation is in Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema); sentence-final particles that interact with these frames are treated in Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force).

95.6 Elliptical answers and minimal clauses

In response to a content question the standard strategy is to repeat the relevant verb phrase, matching the morphology of the questioned predicate. There are no dedicated 'yes' and 'no' words in the affirmation/negation sense that English uses for all questions aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-12-04, asserted; reported across multiple dialects; confirmed against the affirmative-frame ruwe un of Nakagawa 2024: 396) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

For polar questions (yes/no questions), there is notable dialect variation. In the Saru dialect the answer pattern mirrors Japanese: the respondent targets the propositional content of the question and affirms or denies it ('no, I am not going' in reply to 'are you not going?'). In other dialects — attested for Yakumo, Horobetsu, Tokachi, Bibai, Asahikawa, and Sōya among others — the respondent avoids a simple yes/no particle altogether and instead repeats the relevant verb phrase. To a negative polar question like somo e=oman ya? 'are you not going?', a speaker from these dialects would reply with the verb alone, such as somo ku=oman 'I am not going' or ku=oman kus ne 'I am going (because)', rather than with an affirmation or denial particle aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-12-04, asserted ✔; reported across eight dialect localities: Yakumo, Horobetsu, Saru, Tokachi, Bibai, Asahikawa, Nayoro, and Sōya) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

The forms e, ho, and m that superficially resemble affirmation/agreement particles are response-to-call utterances, used when a speaker is addressed by name or summoned — not as affirmations of propositional content aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-12-04, asserted ✔) ‹corpus-confirmed›. They are treated under Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force).

The minimal answer clause is therefore a predicate-only utterance: the subject is entirely omitted and the verb phrase — including any person indexes that anchor the participants — is the complete response. This is predicate ellipsis (the subject NP and topic marker are recoverable from the question), not absence of predication. Interrogative strategies and the full polar-question morphosyntax are treated in Chapter 144 (Interrogative Strategies, Question Particles, and Evidential Questions).

95.7 Vocative fragments and address utterances

Direct address in Hokkaido Ainu uses bare nominal forms — personal names, kin terms, or title nouns — with no predicate. These are not propositions and not even elliptical predications; they are illocutionary acts of calling or summoning a participant. Their grammatical content is entirely addressee-targeting: the utterance indexes who is being addressed, not what is being said about them. In that sense vocative fragments are structurally parallel to the response-to-call particles above — both are non-propositional speech acts that lack a predicate by virtue of their illocutionary type, not by virtue of any structural anomaly. Kin terms used in vocative address may appear in the plain uninflected (non-possessed) form rather than the possessed/affiliative form that the same term would take when used referentially inside a clause, since the affiliative suffix presupposes a possessor argument that is not relevant in a direct address. The illocutionary inventory of Hokkaido Ainu, including the interaction of address, register, and honorific speech, is the subject of Chapter 143 (The Sentence-Final Particle System and Illocutionary Force) and Chapter 154 (Honorific, Ritual, and Taboo Registers). Nakagawa (2024: §4)

95.8 Nominal-frame conditionals: B ne yakun

One productive minor construction builds on the copula by adding the conditional particle yakun ‘if, when (conditional)’: the frame [Subject] [Complement] ne yakun expresses a condition on class membership or identity — 'if (S) is (C), then …' Nakagawa (2024); Satō (2009). Ijäs treats the construction as a standard conditional antecedent in her pedagogical grammar, noting that the copula in the conditional takes the same transitive-subject person indexes as in the declarative Ijäs (2023). In the factual sense the construction is just a copular clause with yakun in the conditional-particle slot that the clause-linkage system places at the right edge of a dependent clause (see Chapter 135 (Conditional, Temporal, and Concessive Clauses) for the full conditional system).

The frame is especially frequent in discourse framing, where a speaker conditionally asserts the identity of a referent as a premise for what follows. The negative counterpart places the standard copula negator before ne: X ka somo ne yakun 'if (S) is not (C)' (see Chapter 100 (TAM, Evidentiality, and Negation on Nonverbal Predicates) for the ka somo ne copula negation pattern, and Chapter 127 (Negative Existential and Possessive: isam) for the existential counterpart). The person-marking behaviour is the same as in the declarative copular clause, including the idiosyncrasy whereby the copula takes no object-person affix even though it is semantically two-place Nakagawa (2024: 132).

One micro-fact about ne in the ka somo ne negation frame and sporadically in other contexts is that the copula appears without a subject affix — the person marking is absent in a way not predicted by the zero-marking of third person aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, aynu-corpora Discord, 2023-12-25, speculative; "reason unclear") ‹speculative›. This is an open gap in the description: no read primary source addresses the pattern systematically, and no structural account of the affix loss has been proposed. It may reflect the frozen or idiom-like status of the ka somo ne string, but this remains without structural support.

The copula also participates in the inchoative 'become' reading when followed by the existential an (the ne an sequence discussed by community members as the Ainu equivalent of Japanese 〜になる) aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (thegodofneet, aynu-corpora Discord, 2024-11-13, proposed; consistent with Refsing 1986: 145 and Nakagawa 2024: 118–119) ‹contested›. That inchoative construction is the interface between the copula and the TAM system and is treated in Chapter 100 (TAM, Evidentiality, and Negation on Nonverbal Predicates) and Chapter 108 (Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Modality: Overview).

95.9 The predicate-omission environment: a unified account

Across the constructions in this chapter, a common thread is the conditions under which the predicate — or its final element — is absent from the surface string. Three environments license predicate-omission or predicate-reduction in Hokkaido Ainu:

1. Illocutionary reduction (formal-noun fragments, §above): the copula or existential that ordinarily closes the formal-noun frame is elided when the illocutionary force is polar-interrogative or exclamative. The nominalizer is retained; only the predicate over it is absent. The licensing condition is a specific illocutionary type, not a general ellipsis rule.
2. Discourse-anaphoric ellipsis (elliptical answers, §above): in responses to polar and content questions, the subject NP and topic material are omitted under identity with the antecedent question; what remains is the predicate alone (or predicate + negator). This is VP-only predication, not verblessness.
3. Non-propositional use (vocatives, address particles): the utterance is not a predication at all, so no predicate is expected. These are illocutionary primitives, outside the scope of clausal syntax.

In none of these environments does an oblique phrase, a bare noun, or a bare adjective function as a predicate head — the environment in which Japanese and many SOV languages routinely omit the copula in informal speech has no structural counterpart in Hokkaido Ainu. The copula ne and the existential an/oka are obligatory in their respective predication environments and cannot be structurally omitted to yield a bare-nominal or bare-locative predicate Nakagawa (2022: 474); Nakagawa (2024: 359–361); Satō (2008: 20–21). The discourse conditions that govern when topic NPs and subject indices may be absent — a separate phenomenon — are treated in Chapter 140 (Topic and Focus Marking: anak(ne), patek, and ka), Chapter 92 (Basic Constituent Order and Head-Final Syntax), and Chapter 93 (Argument Realization: Affix Indexing and Free NP Order).