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

In (8), igi normally means ‘eye’ but in the context of these constructions it comes to mean
‘perception’ and it is the perception of the raised possessor that is transferred from the perceived
entity to the ergative agent of the clause. Now in the Old Babylonian corpus that served as the
basis for my study, there are only sixteen complex predicates that occur in the particular kind of
possessor raising construction in examples (8) through (11) and also include an inalienable noun
as the direct object of the verb; these are listed in (14). Of these sixteen verbal complexes, five
are verbs of direct perception, while seven seem to involve some form of adversity or deprivation
with respect to the raised possessor. No verbs of indirect perception of the ‘look at’ variety occur
in the set.
While Pylkkänen’s typology of applicatives and her transfer of possession model are truly
insightful, I would like to re-examine the syntactic structure that Pylkkänen proposes. Pylkkänen
treats the applicative head, the *bi- prefix in Sumerian, as a higher order predicate that takes the
verbal lexeme, the direct object and the raised possessor as arguments, presumably in some kind
of VP shell as in (15). The possessive/dative phrase, namely gig ‘wheat’, raises into the
postpositional phrase immediately above it and the postpositional phrase as a whole then moves
entirely out of the VP. The ergative DP was probably never in the VP to start with, so we are left
with the surface order of constituents in (15) with the exception of the raising of the possessor
out of the VP. The problem with (15) is that it seems to obscure the thematic relation between
the possessor and the possessed entity, so taking the possessor raising construction as a model,
we might end up instead with something like (17): with the introduction of the low applicative
head in (17b), igi ‘eye’ starts out as the complement of the low applicative head with its
possessor coded in a dative or postpositional phrase. gig ‘wheat’ moves into the specifier
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