Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

dicendi do not appear to belong to the BNBV inal class. To my knowledge, this kind of
slow-motion interpretation of progressive/imperfective achievements (the only
interpretation available for prototypical achievements like “notice” and “spot”) does not
exist in the Sumerian text-artifactual record.
On the basis of both the rather indirect and weak evidence of causal and result
clauses in the previous section and the general semantic cast of the members of the
BNBV inal class, I would hypothesize that the remaining members of the BNBV inal class
are prototypical achievements and that they should not occur in the
progressive/imperfective (marû) aspect except under rather unusual circumstances.
Somewhat less prototypical achievement such as “to die” and “to find,” regularly occur in
the progressive/imperfective without the “film commentary” interpretation as in the
following examples (after Rothstein 2004, 36, ex. 2b and 2d).
(48) a. The cat is dying.
b. Dafna is finding her shoes.
But non-prototypical achievements such as (48a) and (48b) do not occur in the BNBV inal
class, although some of them do occur with the *bi-√ prefix. On the whole, BNBV inal
predicates do not in fact seem to occur in the progressive/imperfective aspect at all: (a)
the one BNBV inal predicate with a suppletive marû root (zu 2-√gub) never suppletes, (b) all
BNBV inal reduplications can be interpreted as ˙amt¬u reduplications, and (c) I demonstrate
in the following section that the relatively few BNBV inal roots which are occasionally
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