Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

eduplicated stem is followed by the nominalizing/resultative suffix, *-a. There are many
open research questions pertaining to the history of the Sumerian adjective that I will not
attempt to address here, but it seems fairly clear that reduplication in the examples in this
section does not indicate plurality of individuals as is typically assumed for ˙amt≥u
reduplication. 17
The types of verbal/adjectival reduplication dealt with in this section, therefore, stand
in opposition to the use of verbal reduplication to indicate plurality, certain types of
pluractionality, or (in the case of “reduced” reduplication) progressive/imperfective
aspect. The simplest explanation for the opposition between the reduplicated forms dealt
with in this section as opposed to the more familiar plural/pluractional forms is that the
forms dealt with in this section are limited to secondary predicational, adverbial or
backgrounding functions, whereas the plural and pluractional uses of reduplication can be
associated with primary predication, verbal or foregrounding discursive functions. In
terms of secondary predication in Sumerian (if that is in fact the proper explanation for
the reduplicated forms dealt with in this section), we should bear in mind that other
studies of reduplication have shown that the particular grammatical phenomena indicated
by reduplication are often determined by the lexical aspectual class of the reduplicated
verbal root in conjunction with the particular morphology of the reduplication or the
morphosyntactic environment in which the reduplicated form occurs (see Edzard 1971;
1972; 1976; Yoshikawa 1993, passim; Krecher 1995 for the morphological forms
17 The use of reduplicated attributive adjectives such as gal.gal in diœir gal.gal.e.ne “the greatest gods” is probably
related to diminuative/delimitative reduplication in that superlatives regularly pick out a limited number of referents
(see Thomsen 2001 [1984], 65; for a brief overview of verbal reduplication in Mandarin and its similarities to the
attenuative prefix /po-/ in Russian, see J. Kim 2003).
118