Anna Bugaeva 8 Ainu complex predicates with reference to Japanese 1 Introduction Ainu, an endangered language in Japan, has long been spoken while receiving influence from Japanese. Although the two languages have apparent similarities in phonological systems, basic constituent order, and some analytic grammatical con- structions, on a deeper level they are structurally very different, as indicated by such properties of Ainu as pronominal verbal marking, no case marking on arguments, mixed alignment, head-marking possessive construction, no tense marking, a great number of coded valency alternations including applicatives – all of which are foreign to Japanese. In this chapter, I will focus on an Ainu construction ‘V1 conjunction wa V2’, which is a rough syntactic equivalent of the -te converbal complex predicate construc- tion in Japanese (e.g. tabe-te miru ‘try eating’, lit. ‘eat and see’). In both languages two verbs connected by a linker just work together. Though the two constructions, henceforth also referred to as ‘complex predicates’ or ‘complexes’, are not the same structurally, their meanings look superficially similar. I am going to show that they have developed under contact, more specifically, via the strong influence of Japanese on Ainu. After a few introductory Sections 2 and 3, I will look at syntactic and semantic features of complex predicates in Ainu comparing them to those of Japanese. My goal is to determine to what extent two verbs function as a single predicate syntac- tically (Section 4) and semantically (Section 5), i.e. to measure the degree of gram- maticalization of the respective constructions. And finally, in Sections 6 and 7, I will provide the details of interaction with Japanese in the formation of complex predicates in Hokkaido Ainu and adduce several different scenarios depending on a particular complex predicate type. 2 Ainu: Sociolinguistic situation and basic properties Ainu (isolate) is a critically endangered language for which no field work is any longer possible. It consists of three major dialects: Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kuril Ainu. Hokkaido Ainu dialects are divided into southwestern and northeastern groups. This chapter will use data of the southern branch of southwestern dialects of Saru DOI 10.1515/9781614514077-009 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 (Unicode 9 25/9/17 19:38) WDG-New (170mmÂ240mm) DGMetaSerifScience (OpenType) pp. 247–272 1859 Pardeshi_08_Bugaeva (p. 247)