Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2
Decomposing lexical aspect:
Telicity, the particle-verb construction and secondary predication
Having outlined a rather involved set of case-marking relations in the BNBV inal
construction at the end of chapter 1—the transfer of possession from a raised locative-
terminative source to a goal in the ergative case—this chapter seeks to clarify several
nagging issues that have to do with lexical aspect and whether or not aspectual properties
interact with this curious case-marking regime in any palpable way. I argue that, in fact,
the BNBV inal construction provides a useful diagnostic class for resolving a number of
outstanding problems in previous explanations of the lexical aspectual system in
Sumerian, notably Yoshikawa’s proposal that the introduction of ßu “hand” into an
otherwise atelic predicate (forming, in many cases, a BNBV inal construction) converts it
into a telic predicate. But prior to turning to Yoshikawa’s proposal, several preliminary
steps are necessary: in section 2.1, a number of basic theoretical tools such as the
opposition between lexical and grammatical aspect, the Vendlerian classification of
lexical aspectual categories and the opposition between depictive and resultative
secondary predication are introduced; in section 2.2, an analogy is drawn between
92