Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

esult clause: “He made a pile of stones in the mountains, so that/with the result that it
stretched across the mountains like floating clouds, like a huge wall . . . .”
Overall, therefore, the best candidate for the tertium quid mentioned at the beginning
of the section is an interpretation of reduplicated BNBV inal predicates as adverbial clauses
of cause or result. The evidence is quite slim, but what little evidence does exist seems to
point in that direction. Other possibilities certainly exist, however: I suspect that future
work on quantification and/or the mass/count noun opposition in Sumerian may
ultimately yield a more conclusive result. Of the four lexical aspectual types identified at
the beginning of the chapter, three seem to determine the interpretation of the
adjectival/adverbial constructions found in ˙amt≥u reduplication: activities (Gtn-stem
depictive secondary predicates), achievements (iptaras-stem causal secondary predicates)
and accomplishments (D-stem resultative secondary predicates). In the previous section, I
argued that certain subsets of adjectival roots were formed through verbal reduplication
in earlier historical phases of the language and, furthermore, that in the period
represented by the text-artifactual record or just before, the formation of adjectival roots
through reduplication yielded a number of distinct semantic classes, but primarily a
diminutive semantics as also seen in Mandarin Chinese. Whether the
diminutive/delimitative lexical aspectual class as evidenced in Mandarin exists in
Sumerian, remains an open question. But it seems fairly clear that ˙amt≥u reduplication
can be associated with adjectival/adverbial formation at all levels of the grammar; the
particular grammatical effects of such adjectival/adverbial formations remain, however,
to be worked out in future studies.
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