Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

aspect” as a rough equivalent to “progressive aspect” and “non-progressive/perfective
aspect” as its opposite. Derived accomplishments, in turn, come in at least two varieties
in English, progressive/imperfective achievements (“Dafna is finding her shoes”
[Rothstein 2004, 36, ex. 2b]) and light verb constructions (“John gave the floor a clean
sweep” derived from the resultative “John swept the floor clean”) and derived
accomplishments in Sumerian seem to exhibit some properties of both these
constructions. In section 2.4, the type of derived accomplishment constructions that are
criterial for the identification of achievement predicates are introduced on the basis of
English data and the non-agentive character of achievements is elaborated, whereas in
section 2.5, the distributional facts associated with derived accomplishments in Sumerian
are presented in some detail and lead, in turn, to a redescription of the function of ßu in
certain BNBV inal constructions.
The penultimate section of the chapter differs from the earlier ones in that it
correlates three of the phenomena associated with BNBV inal constructions earlier in the
dissertation (transfer of possession, inalienability and telicity) with a particular,
typologically common syntactic pattern known as a particle-verb construction. Particle-
verb constructions, which are extremely common in English, are one of the regular means
of controlling telicity in SVO and VSO languages: the isolation of an adposition in the
vicinity of the verb that lacks a nominal complement is used to transform atelic predicates
into telic ones as in the frequent use of directional particles in English (“pour” as opposed
to “pour out,” “fill” as opposed to “fill in” and so forth). Whereas the raised ergative
possessor of an inalienable noun in a BNBV inal construction is not presumably involved in
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