The mixed nominative-neutral-inverse morphological alignment of Sakhalin Ainu

This paper discusses the Sakhalin Ainu morphological alignment. Starting from previous studies that focused primarily on Hokkaidō Ainu, the author presents a new proposal for the diachronic development of the Sakhalin Ainu person agreement system. He argues that the Proto Sakhalin Ainu person agreement system originally exhibited a mixed nominative-neutral alignment, in which with time portmanteau prefixes that syncretize over different first-second person interactions within the transitive paradigm arose under phonological and discoursive pressure. More recently in the history of the language, the emergence of a marker of person referentiality mismatch provided the means to mark subjects in sap-to-sap contexts and eased the development of what is tentatively discussed as an instantiation of inverse alignment.