Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

esultative secondary predicates—into Trask’s model for the development of Type B
ergativity. It looks like word-order (at least with respect to the order of lexical verb and
verbal prefix) acts as a fairly good indicator of the scope of the existential quantification
introduced by the *bi-√ verbal prefix. If so, I argue that the shift from ROOT-*bi to
*bi-ROOT order, which corresponds to the shift from underlying, “imperative” word-
order to the word-order found in finite verbs, 12 corresponds to a narrowing of the scope of
the *bi-√ prefix and that this change is a direct result of the grammaticalization of *-e as
an ergative postposition. In other words, the change in word/morpheme-order resulted
from the development of ergativity and can be explained as a way of indicating a
corresponding change in the hierarchical relation (and hence scope relations) between
verbal prefix and lexical verb.
12 Michalowski describes the process that forms the imperative construction in Sumerian as “[c]opying the root to the
front of the verbal form” (Michalowski 2004, 43). But even if Michalowski is correct, the diachronic structure of the
language need not mirror its synchronic structure.
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