1 Low applicatives and the mapping hypothesis in Sumerian J. Cale ...

In the contrastive focus construction in (18), the topic ama-bi is a definite DP and acts as the
quantifier for the clause as a whole, the focus phrase tilla iri-za-ka-åe nu-am ‘it is not to the
square of your city’ is the nuclear scope in the clause and the only remaining part of sentence,
namely bibsared—meaning ‘that they should be made to run’—must be mapped into a
restriction on the quantifier ama-bi. The example in (18) therefore yields something like: “As for
the mothers, it is not to the square of your [= Gilgamesh’s] city that they should be made to run.”
Now, translating the topic/focus articulation into the quantificational language that Diesing uses,
the topic, ama-bi, is the quantifier; the restriction on the quantifier is the restrictive relative at the
far right of (18), and the nuclear scope—the part of the sentence that is being asserted rather than
presupposed—corresponds to the focus phrase that is marked by the copula and immediately
precedes the verb. Since the verb bibsared ‘that they should be made to run’ acts as the
restriction on the topicalized DP ama-bi, it must move out of the VP so as to avoid existential
closure. I would suggest that the underlying head of what seems to be an internally headed
restrictive relative, namely ama, pied-pipes the relative into IP as predicted by Basilico’s study
of head placement in internally headed relatives (1996) and is subsequently topicalized out of
the relative and into clause-initial position. The important distributional fact is that low
applicatives, namely the verbal complexes that select for a non-specific nominal component as in
(8) do not occur in the type of contrastive focus construction in (18) apparently because the non-
specific bare noun must remain within the VP if it is to restrict the predicate.
[[Conclusion]]
Thus, as long as the verbal complex remains within the VP, the nominal component is non-
specific, denotes a property, and forms part of the predicate as part of a low applicative. When,
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