Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

topic and focus. This dissertation investigates the *bi-√ prefix as part of a larger effort to
identify some of these basic morphosyntactic oppositions in the text-artifactual record of
the Sumerian materials that originate from Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000-1600 BCE)
in Mesopotamia. I argue that the occurrence of a bare inalienable noun immediately to
the left of a *bi-√ prefix verb forms a distinctive morphosyntactic construction which can
be identified on the basis of both morphosyntactic and semantic critieria as a low source
applicative construction.
The identification of this subset of the occurrences of the *bi-√ prefix as a low
source applicative construction has broad implications for other parts of Sumerian
grammar, in particular, the development of ergativity in the language. The low source
applicative construction is limited to a group of verbs that includes verbs of perception
and adversity and can be juxtaposed to a type of causative construction in which a bare
alienable noun occurs immediately to the left of the *bi-√ prefix. This opposition stems
from the fact that, in the low source applicative construction, the ergative noun phrase is
the possessor of the inalienable noun rather than the agent of the clause. In order to
elucidate several possible correlations between the clausal possessive constructions
underlying the use of the low source applicative and the development of ergativity,
several other issues are also dealt with in considerable detail in the balance of the
dissertation: the use of possessive pronominal suffixes to code definiteness and
topicalization as well as the role of indefiniteness and the definiteness effect in verbs of
perception, head-internal relative clauses and contrastive focus constructions.
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