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Ainu Internal Reconstruction: on the Origin and Typological Context of the Affiliative Form


This paper discusses the history and prehistory of the so-called affiliative form in Ainu, also known as the “possessive” or “concrete” form of nominals. In earlier research, this form has been understood as belonging to the sphere of suffixal morphology, complicated by the impact of vowel harmony and/or nominal classes. This paper shows, however, that the marking of the affiliative form actually involves a trace of the original stem-final vowel otherwise lost in the language, followed by a recently grammaticalized separate particle. This means that Ainu must have undergone a general process of final vowel loss, which has substantially changed its morpheme structure and ultimately caused the morphophonological alternations connected with the affiliative form. This conclusion potentially opens up the way towards a more comprehensive internal reconstruction of Ainu.