Abstract
(I) Verbal Particles In this paper, the author discusses the particles, esp. the verbal particles, of the Saru dialect of Ainu as a part of the study of its grammatical structure. Scholars of the Ainu language so far have presented a very long list of particles. However, many heterogeneous forms are included therein. In describing language, the author's main principles are : first, since grammatical structure differs from dialect to dialect, a linguist cannot reasonably describe all the dialects en masse (as is seen in an expression such as "Ainu has such and such particles"); each dialect must be studied separately ; second, grammatical features and phonological or morpho-phonological features must not be confounded in the course of a description ; a grammatical classification of forms (into so-called "parts of speech") must be made strictly in terms of grammatical features. For this dialect, the author defines the particle as a set of grammatically defined words which always occur finally in a construction and never stand at the beginning of a sentence. According to their grammatical function (or distribution), these particles are divided into six subclasses : verbal, nominal, conjunctional, casemarking, adverbial, and final particles. There are thirteen varbal particles in this dialect, the shape, function and meaning of which are here described. It is also noted here that some verbs are often used like a verbal particle, which have commonly been classified as verbal particles by the author's predecessors.
