Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Italian and Greek, see Lyons 1999, 22-25 with references). Bare nouns in Sumerian,
therefore, have at least the possibility of being indefinite.
The other piece of, admittedly, indirect evidence in favor of linking the BNBV inal
distributional class with indefiniteness has to do with the location of the so-called
dimensional infixes (a class of directional morphemes that appear in the verbal prefix)
within the Sumerian verb: in purely formal terms, the *bi-√ prefix excludes the entire set
of dimensional infixes. In the system of numbered morphosyntactic slots proposed by
Jagersma/Zólyomi, the dimensional infixes occupy slots [ ] 7 through [ ] 9, whereas the
*bi-√ prefix, segmented into /b/ and /i/ fills slots [ ] 5/6 and [ ] 10. In the slightly different
system in use at the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, the dimensional infixes fill slots
[ ] 4, [ ] 6, and [ ] 8, while the *bi-√ prefix is split into slots [ ] 3 and [ ] 9. The point that is
recognized by both systems is, as plainly stated by Gragg, “[t]he dimensional infixes, as a
rule, do not occur with bí-, im.mi-, or al-” (Gragg 1973a, 15). But more importantly,
Gragg’s seminal work on the dimensional infixes makes clear that there is no regular
“agreement” between postpositions and dimensional infixes:
In these literary texts there are approximately 700 occurrences of the postposition
- ß è . But the infix - ß i - occurs only 142 times. … of these 142 occurrences of the
infix, only 35 give the infix and the postposition together. While these statistics do
not disprove the view just outlined [that the infixes arise through “agreement” with
co-occurring postpositions], they do make it seem less likely; in fact, given these
statistics one might well hypothesize that the infix and the postposition tend to be
mutually exclusive rather than interdependent” (Gragg 1973a, 16)
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