Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific

Abstract

Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however, in that the possessor is coded not as a dependent in an NP but as an argument in a finite clause, and the appositive word is a verb. This paper gives a first comprehensive, typologically grounded description of Ainu possession and reconstructs the pattern that must have been standard when Ainu was still the daily language of a large speech community; Ainu then had multiple alienable class constructions. We report a cross-linguistic survey expanding previous coverage of the appositive type and show how Ainu fits in. We split alienable/inalienable into two different phenomena: argument structure (with types based on possessibility: optionally possessible, obligatorily possessed, and non-possessible) and valence (alienable, inalienable classes). Valence-changing operations are derived alienability and derived inalienability. Our survey classifies the possessive systems of languages in these terms.

Keywords: Ainu; Circum-Pacific; Pacific Rim; appositive; classifier; possessive.

Figure 1:

Languages with (black) vs. without (gray) appositive possessive constructions. Triangles represent Austronesian languages, which make up the majority of the cases with appositive possessives in the west. (Base map: Equal Earth projection, Šavrič et al. 2019).

Figure 2:

Estimated ratio between the odds of families being biased toward appositive possessive inside vs. outside the Circum-Pacific region. The dashed line indicates an odds ratio of 1, i.e. equal odds for appositive possessive biases inside and outside the region. The estimates of the odds ratios are plotted as densities across the large family data and all sampled extrapolations, so the heights of the gray areas indicate how many samples have a given odds ratio (x-axis). The black dots represent the median across the samples and the black horizontal lines represent the 90% highest density of estimates around the median (leaving 5% on each side). The bottom density (“obs.”) reports the estimates from the observed data, as reported in Supplementary Material S1. The other densities are counterfactual estimates and report how the odds ratio would look if +1, +2, +3, or +4 more families or isolates turned up with appositive possessives outside the Circum-Pacific region (cf. Table S2 in Supplementary Material S2 for a numerical summary).