In: Matsumoto, Yoshiko, Comrie, Bernard & Sells, Peter. Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Reshaping theoretical and geographical boundaries. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. — 38 p.
Indeed, Ainu shares with Japanese a good deal of properties which are believed to correlate with the GNMCC. Just like Japanese, Ainu is a language with low referential density, the modifying clause is in a form that can be used independently without having the head noun and an extended array of semantic and grammatical relations can be represented by the head noun. However, unlike Japanese, Ainu is extremely strict with the argument structure.1 Moreover, Ainu makes little use of nominalization, see §7, which normally helps, at least partially, to reduce argument structure. In this paper, based on the data from Southern Hokkaido Ainu, the best documented group of dialects which used to be spoken in the proximity to mainland Japanese, I will describe a range of possible grammatical and semantic relations between the modifying clause and noun. I will argue that the interpretation of noun-modifying constructions in Ainu (here: Southern Hokkaido) depends largely on grammatical relations, much less on pragmatics; thus Ainu lacks the prototypical GNMCC. Ainu formally distinguishes between relative clauses and noun-complement clause constructions. The latter include sentential complements of a noun and fact-S (or “the story that…”) noun-complements both requiring a possessive suffix on the head noun, just like Turkish (Comrie 1998). Consider the following examples from Comrie (1998: 54-5) with my reinterpretation of morphemic boundaries and glosses in, cf. the nominal possessive construction in.