Materials and methods of analysis for the study of the Ainu language - Southern Hokkaidō and Sakhalin varieties

This volume is intended to be a practical manual to learn the basics of the Ainu language, in its varieties of Southern Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. Each lesson presents one specific topic that is investigated taking into account both varieties of the language. Three kinds of activities guide the student throughout each lesson to inductively make generalizations on the language that can be supported by linguistic evidence and, possibly, to revise the information they were given as a start of their analysis. In order to do this, the student learns to observe the data, recognize recurring patterns and exceptions, and formulate a description of the language behaviors illustrated by the given examples. At the end of each lesson the student actively gains knowledge of the Ainu language by producing themselves a set of descriptive rules. The course aims at giving the student some basic analytical tools to approach and analyze Ainu language sources. Furthermore, the student will gain knowledge about the genealogical relationship of the Ainu language and about important sociolinguistic issues relative to its past history and present status of vitality

The Interaction of Relativization and Noun Incorporation in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu

This paper focuses on relativization in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu. Specifically, evidential expressions constitute the scope of this study since within this semantic domain a morphosyntactic layout reminiscent of internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) is found. Moreover, the structure of some evidential expressions suggests that what gives rise to an IHRC in those instances is classificatory noun incorporation (CNI). Following from past studies on Ainu, where IHRCs and CNI are never discussed, and with reference to cross-linguistic approaches to relativization and incorporation, this study addresses the interaction of these two processes in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu and suggests their reconsideration

On the object-individuation function of the East Sakhalin Ainu impersonal passive

This paper presents an account of a Sakhalin Ainu (also Enciw‘itah, isolate, Russia and Japan) construction that semantically encodes an agent-patient interaction and that is characterized morphosyntactically by the expression of the agent with an oblique. In the analysis to follow, this construction is named ‘impersonal passive’ by analogy with a structurally and functionally similar construction attested in the Southern Hokkaidō dialects of Ainu. Keeping the main focus on eastern dialects, the paper takes a primarily semantic approach to the East Sakhalin Ainu impersonal passive and underlines a number of striking structural differences with the Hokkaidō counterpart. In addition, it will be argued that in the north-eastern dialects of Sakhalin Ainu, the impersonal passive can be described as an object- individuation construction (OIC), which marks a patient object as referential and definite and has the pragmatic extension of overtly flagging the topicality of this object at the discourse level. As such, the OIC compensates for the lack or non-obligatoriness of overt marking for definiteness and topicality in Sakhalin Ainu. The present paper adds to our knowledge on the still under-described Sakhalin variety of Ainu and to our understanding of the verbal and nominal semantics of Ainu more generally, which to date remains a largely unexplored topic

"Meko Oyasi", a Sakhalin Ainu ucaskuma narrated by Haru Fujiyama

In this chapter, we would like to present a folktale of the Sakhalin Ainu tradition narrated by Haru Fujiyama, who was a speaker of the Rayciska dialect of Sakhalin Ainu and also one of the last native speakers of this Ainu variety. The folktale entitled meko oyasi ‘the cat spirits’ was originally included in a corpus of West Sakhalin Ainu folklore and conversations published as Sakhalin Ainu: Materials (カラフトアイヌ語 – 資料 Karafuto Ainugo: Shiryō) (The Karafuto Ainu language – Texts) by Kyōko Murasaki in 1976

A Comparative Analysis of an East Sakhalin Ainu folktale collected by Bronisław Piłsudski

This contribution presents a linguistic analysis of an East Sakhalin Ainu folktale collected by Bronisław Piłsudski in 1903. The author bases their analysis on two different versions of the text, which Piłsudski compiled himself using a cyrillic-script-based and a latin-script-based transcription for Ainu. Taking into account two versions of the folktale where different scripts are used proves insightful with regards to phonetics and phonology and, thanks to Piłsudski’s painstakingly accurate transcription, allows for investigation despite the lack of a backup audio recording. Starting from Piłsudski’s originals, the author provides a re-transliteration of the text, following modern standard conventions for Ainu, and a morphemic analysis. A discussion of the most salient grammatical aspects of the informant’s language fol-lows and a comparison with neighboring West Sakhalin Ainu dialects is drawn

The development of analytic negatives in Sakhalin Ainu

The aim of this work is to give an overview of negative constructions in Sakhalin Ainu (henceforth SA). By the end of the paper, I will argue that SA negative constructions have developed from a synthetic construction into an analytic one

Polysemy and apparent polyfunctionality of the Sakhalin Ainu prefixes e- and ko-: Insights on applicativization and aspect

The present study focuses on the polysemous verbal prefixes e- and ko- of Sakhalin Ainu and proposes their analysis as markers of high transitivity. The author takes a compositional approach to argument structure and event structure in order to account for the main use of e- and ko- as applicative markers as well as for their less common use as markers of resultative-completive and intensive aspect. Ultimately, the analysis shows that the apparent polyfunctionality of e- and ko- arises from two separate applications at the syntax-semantics level of one same underlying function of the prefixes. The author also comments on how the Sakhalin Ainu case fits in with other cases of valence-aspect conceptual overlapping cross-linguistically and on the implications of his findings for Ainu studies specifically

The language and folklore of West Sakhalin Ainu - A re-edition of Murasaki Kyōko's 'Karafuto Ainugo' with translation and grammatical notes

This book is a re-edition of Kyōko Murasaki’s カラフトアイヌ語 – 資料 (Karafuto ainugo – Shiryō) (The Karafuto Ainu language – Texts) and カラフトアイヌ語 – 文法篇 (Karafuto ainugo – Bunpō hen) (The Karafuto Ainu language – Grammar), published in 1976 and 1979 respectively by Kokushokan Kōkai. The two volumes are the result of 11 years of fieldwork in Tokoro (常呂), a small town on the northern coast of Hokkaidō that faces the Okhotsk Sea, about 30 kilometers west of Abashiri. In Tokoro, Kyōko Murasaki worked with two of the last native speakers of Sakhalin Ainu, Haru Fujiyama and Yuk Ōta