Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/38298

It is known that Japanese conditional expressions often require particular modal expressions in the sentence-final position. Roughly speaking, it has been said that among those sentence-final modal expressions, the epistemic modal expressions are assigned the most important status in Japanese conditional expressions. However, in Ainu conditional expressions, although they often have modal restrictions on sentence-final moods just like Japanese, the nature is rather different between them: in Ainu, some conditional expressions require the interrogative and imperative modal expressions only, so the epistemic mood does not necessarily play a crucial role. This fact may cast doubts about the generality of the "conception level" often used in the study of the Japanese conditional expressions. In addition, by contrasting Japanese and Ainu, it is shown that yakun is the most important among the Ainu conditional expressions since it has extremely wider usage corresponding to that of at least three different conditional expressions of Japanese.