Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

involved in Sumerian verbal reduplication; cf. Newman 1990, 53-130; 2000, 508-521 for
an interesting set of materials for comparison). In a study of verbal reduplication in
Niuean, Haji-Abdolhosseini, Massam and Oda have demonstrated that considerations of
the morphological form of reduplication as well as the lexical aspectual class of the
reduplicated verb regularly predict the meaning or grammatical function of reduplication
in each case (Haji-Abdolhosseini et al. 2002, 488-489); similarly, the contrast in English
between “he painted the red house” and “he painted the house red” demonstrates the
difference a morphosyntactic environment makes: the adjective in the first of the two
examples is an attributive adjective in a run-of-the-mill noun phrase, but the adjective in
the second sentence is a resultative secondary predicate.
In the following section, I look at the relatively small number of examples in which
the verbal root of a BNBV inal predicate is reduplicated. I argue that reduplication of the
verbal root in these cases is an indication of the fact that they are secondary and/or
adverbial rather than an indication of plurality. This in turn raises the issue of which
lexical aspectual class reduplicated BNBV inal roots belong to. I think that there are good
reasons for assigning BNBV inal predicates in which the root is reduplicated—at least to
the degree that they are secondary predicates—to a third lexical aspectual alongside the
accomplishments that form the resultative (D-stem) class and the activities that form the
depictive (Gtn-stem) class. Although the particular secondary or adverbial nuance
remains unclear, I suggest that one possibility is that it forms an adverbial clause of cause
or result and corresponds to a particular use of the iptaras form in Akkadian.
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