GENGO KENKYU (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan)

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Possessive, nominative, objective, and nominative-objective personal affixes (mostly prefixes) of Ainu (the Raichishka dialect) and their sememes aredescribed.
With regard to the syntactical distribution of the possessive personal prefixes, it is pointed out, among other things, that kurasno poro'esetaha «black large your dog»(seta «dog») is the best expression, while ‘ekurasno poro setaha «your black large dog» is also possible, but ×’ekurasno ‘eporo’ esetaha is impossible. The author analyzesthe second expression into two immediate constituents:'e setaha and kurasno poro. The form setaha in the former has no prefix because it is a fraction of the (broken) form setaha «your dog», whereas setaha «his (her, their) dog» in kurasno poro setaha has a zero prefix which means «the third personer's».
According to the author, 'ekurasno poro setaha is better described as consisting of four words ('e-being viewed as a proclitic) rather than as a compound, because each of its three parts, written separately above, has its own prosodeme, and other free forms of the same class can freely replace kurasno, poro, and seta.

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