Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

the particle-verb features of the construction (since the ergative case is a “core” or
“structural” case analogous to the nominative or accusative cases and the combination of
inalienable noun and its possessor seems to form a single unit in terms of reference and
thematic role), the raised possessor in the locative-terminative case, however, seems to
form an existential construction in conjunction with the low source application
morpheme *bi-√ and, in this section, I propose that the combination of the raised
locative-terminative possessor, the inherently relational bare noun and the low source
applicative morpheme act as a unit in SOV languages like Sumerian to introduce telicity
to otherwise atelic predicates in the same way that stranded adpositions do in SVO or
VSO languages. On the basis of Szabolcsi’s proposal that weak quantifiers—
such as the bare noun in BNBV inal constructions—can act as a kind of catalyst for the
formation of verbal complexes in verb-final languages, I apply the model of complex
verb formation described by Koopman and Szabolcsi (2000) to the formation of verbal
complexes in Sumerian, yielding a relatively coherent description of a particle-verb
construction in an SOV language. The interesting corollary of this proposal is that the
particular semantics of the set of indefinite body-part nouns that form the nominal
component of BNBV inal constructions, particularly in terms of their inherently relational
and orientational features, correspond quite closely to the relational and orientational
features of the directional adpositions typically found in particle-verb constructions in
other languages.
In the last section, I make a first attempt at incorporating the telicity of the BNBV
construction—in particular, the similarity between particle-verb constructions and
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