Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

nominal modified by the secondary predicate is necessarily a non-agentive theme
argument with respect to the secondary predicate. 14
In the Sumerological tradition, telicity is nothing new: much of Yoshikawa’s work
centers on telicity (Yoshikawa 1988 [1993, 72-94]). It is clear from his collected works
that his use of the two terms, “telicity” and “momentariness,” represents his attempt to
make sense of, on the one hand, the fact that certain verbs have natural end points
(“telicity”) such as “to build a house,” while others such as “to run” do not, and, on the
other hand, the fact that certain verbs lack any inherent duration (“momentariness”) such
as “to snap” or “to pop.” The difficulty that one faces in attempting to assimilate
Yoshikawa’s aspectual metalanguage of telicity and momentariness to ongoing work in
the study of aspect is substantial, but I have attempted in the following to take the lexical
classes of ˙amt≥u reduplication identified by Yoshikawa and redescribe them in terms of
secondary predication and the aspectual terminology in present-day use. I should
emphasize, however, that Yoshikawa’s typology of ˙amt≥u reduplication relies above all
on semantic criteria that are dependent on the reliability of Old Babylonian scribal
traditions maintained by non-native speakers.
14 This follows from much of the discussion about internal as opposed to external arguments in the generative tradition:
since telicity is typically associated with the VP, it makes some sense that it is only nominal arguments that occur
within the VP that can be modified by a secondary predicate. This would also explain why unaccusatives tolerate
resultative secondary predicates, whereas unergatives do not.
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