Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.2 D-stem/Gtn-stem reduplication in Sumerian
In the wake of Yoshikawa’s revolutionary description of grammatical aspect in Sumerian
(see Yoshikawa 1968a, 1968b, 1974, 1989, 1993; written in dialogue with, at least to
some degree, Edzard’s several iterations of a competing theory [1967, 1971, 1972], cf.
Krecher 1995), the debate devolved to a class of reduplicated verbal roots that came to be
called “˙amt¬u reduplications” due to the fact that they did not seem to belong to
Yoshikawa’s marû reduplication class; Edzard termed these examples of reduplication
freie Reduplikation, identifiable in formal terms by, prototypically, full CVC
reduplication in opposition to the reduced CV reduplication of Yoshikawa’s marû
reduplication class and the use of the same pattern of pronominal agreement as non-
reduplicated ˙amt≥u roots. Much of Yoshikawa’s subsequent work, therefore, focused on
questions of lexical aspect (primarily Yoshikawa 1979 [1993, 287-308] and 1981 [1993,
309-322], cf. 1988 [1993, 72-94]). Yoshikawa argues that two distinct classes of freie
Reduplikation forms can be distinguished (besides marû reduplications, which would
constitute a third non-freie Reduplikation class [Yoshikawa (1979, 119 [1993, 308])]) on
the basis of the form of the corresponding Akkadian verb in bilingual contexts: punctate
verbs (including, prototypically, what are often now termed semelfactives in the
literature, cf. Rothstein 2004, 28-29) such as “to hit,” “to break,” and “to snap,” which
generally take Akkadian translations in the D-stem, can be juxtaposed to atelic verbs of,
for the most part, repetitive motion such as “to crawl,” which are usually translated by
Akkadian verbs in the Gtn-stem. Yoshikawa further notes that the opposition between
these two classes corresponds to the transitivity of their respective predicates: those
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