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

Chung and McCloskey (2004) or Van Geenhoven and McNally (2005). When, however, the
nominal component is specific and moves out of the VP, it forms a kind of internally headed
relative that is causative in meaning. In the end, I use a negative contrastive focus construction in
combination with Diesing’s mapping hypothesis to differentiate the applicative and the causative
in Sumerian.
[[Possessor raising]]
In a language like English, possessor raising is a relatively limited phenomenon found in
constructions in which the possessed entity—rather than the possessor—has raised out of the
ordinary, prenominal possessive DP to form an encompassing NP as in Kayne’s famous example
in (1): “two pictures of John’s.” Kayne is primarily interested in what “of” is doing in this
construction, the parallels with datives of possession in other languages and how this feeds into
his theory of relative clause formation, but the reason why this example is important to me is that
it offers a mechanism for attaching a non-specific NP like “two pictures” to a highly specific DP
like the possessor in (1). The non-specificity and consequent absence of a DP superstructure is
particularly clear in an existential sentence such as in (2). Note that if the unraised “John’s two
pictures” were to appear in (2), it would yield a pair-list reading, thereby demonstrating the
specificity contrast.
Now, in the kind of language where possessor raising is typically described—and here I’m
thinking of primarily of Biblical Hebrew rather than the Hungarian that has figured so centrally
in syntactic research—it is actually the possessor that raises rather than the possessed entity: in
fact the possessor raises all the way out of the DP that it specifies and forms a separate phrase in
2