Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.3 BNBV inal reduplication: Depictive, resultative or tertium quid?
In light of the opposition between D-stem, resultative reduplications and Gtn-stem,
depictive reduplications, the aspectual properties of BNBV inal predicates do not seem to
conform to the expectations of either of these two classes. This section presents the
relatively few examples of BNBV inal predicates in which the verbal root is reduplicated
and formulates one possible solution to their meaning and morphosyntactic function. The
conventional interpretation of these forms is that they indicate plurality of a noun in the
nominative/absolutive case. Although the interpretation of them as plural does explain
some of the following examples, others do not seem to involve plurality. Since there is no
independent evidence of plurality in these cases (other than the reduplication itself), I
tentatively propose an alternative analysis of “reduplicated” BNBVinal predicates as a
form of secondary or adverbial predication. If BNBV inal “reduplication” is secondary or
adverbial, the simplest hypothesis would be that it belongs to either the resultative (D-
stem) reduplication class or the depictive (Gtn-stem) reduplication class, but neither form
of reduplication seems to correspond to the following examples of BNBV inal
“reduplication.”
In Yoshikawa’s paper “Verbal Reduplication in Sumerian” (Yoshikawa 1979 [1993,
287-308]), in which he breaks down the various ˙amt¬u reduplications noted by Edzard
(1971; 1972) into groups on the basis of the form of parallel, Akkadian verbs in
bilinguals (largely lexical lists), the lone example of a BNBV inal predicate in Yoshikawa’s
typology stands out as an exception and remains unclassified: œiß-√tuk (Yoshikawa 1993,
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