Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

gave the floor a clean sweep” only works if the wind is personified a great deal. This
seems, therefore, to conform to Rothstein’s expectation that the subject of achievements
is non-agentive, while the subject off accomplishments is necessarily agentive.
Thinking back to my earlier discussion of non-agentivity in achievements and the
role of ergative possessor and inalienable body-part noun as a single constituent in the
absolutive case, the reason for the use of the ßu may be elucidated somewhat: since ßu is
the most agentive of the possible body-part nouns in a BNBV inal construction and the
derived accomplishment in (70c) must use some means of reintroducing an agent into a
previously non-agentive achievement predicate, ßu is the natural choice. The crucial
factor, however, in differentiating such agent-introducing ßu constructions from
ordinary BNBV inal constructions in which the nominal component happens to be ßu
seems to be nominalization. The BNBV inal predicates can appear without any form of
nominalization, whereas pseudo-agentive ßu in derived accomplishments only seems to
occur under some form of nominalization. But, given the paucity of sources and the
difficulty of differentiating them within such a relatively unstructured corpus, it has
been difficult to identify this opposition in the text-artifactual records. Beyond the
examples of the ßu ˙ul bi 2.in.du 11.ga construction above, I have been able to locate
only a few other examples of ßu, where it introduces an agent rather than provides
some specific semantic content to the predicate.
(71) Ur Lament [2.2.2], l. 258 (Karahashi 2000, 149)
ki
256. egir3.re eß3 uri2 ˙ul.a.na Over her devastated shrine Urim, the
gig.ga.bi im.me princess bitterly declares:
166