Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.5 Introducing telicity, ßu, and inalienable possession under nominalization
Among the many morphosyntactic proposals that originate from Yoshikawa’s work, one
of the most surprising is that otherwise atelic predicates can, under certain circumstances,
be made telic through the introduction of ßu “hand” in a compound verb construction of
some kind (Yoshikawa 1993, 82-84). The clearest source of derived telicity, in my view
however, is the use of the *bi-√ prefix. This leads to a rather interesting aporia in that, as
argued above, the BNBV inal predicates are the prototypical examples of achievements and
they include (by definition) a *bi-√ prefix verb as well as an inalienable noun such as ßu:
the obvious question is which of these two elements is responsible for the telicity of these
predicates. The plausibility of Yoshikawa’s proposal has been obscured up to now by my
artificial exclusion of BNBV inal predicates in which ßu functions as the nominal
component from my initial survey in chapter 1, but these examples will be presented at
the conclusion of this section.
At the beginning of the chapter, I spoke of D-stem reduplication in Sumerian as
analogous to resultative secondary predication, but at the time I was hesitant to classify
D-stem reduplications as resultative secondary predicates in the strict sense. One of the
reasons for my hesitation was that the D-stem reduplications differ from ordinary
resultatives in a number of little ways, but the main reason for my hesitation was that
there is an extremely small group of constructions in Sumerian which resemble English-
style secondary predicates even more and that may also provide some insight into which
of the two elements, *bi-√ or ßu, codes telicity: the two examples of this phenomenon
that I am aware of follow in (63) and (64).
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