Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

2.6 BNBV inal as a particle-verb construction
Up to now, I have concentrated on the semantic properties of the BNBV inal construction,
particularly in terms of lexical aspect and certain interactions between lexical and
grammatical aspect. Here in the penultimate section of this chapter, I describe the formal
or distributional features that code the meanings suggested above. What morphosyntactic
means, in other words, are used in Sumerian to code telicity and the phenomena related to
it? I argue in the following that the BNBV inal construction is a particular kind of particle-
verb construction (familiar from a variety of present-day European languages) and that
the *bi-√ prefix is analogous to the particle in a particle verb construction and contributes
telicity to the meaning of predicates in which it occurs. It has long been recognized that
in English, for example, particles—prepositions that lack a nominal complement—are
often used to control the telicity of verbs.
(83) He hammered it Ø for three hours / *in three hours.
(84) He hammered it out for three hours / in three hours.
In these examples, as is standard practice, a temporal adverb can be used to differentiate a
telic event from an atelic one: in (83), an atelic verb can only occur with an unbounded
temporal adverb, for three hours, whereas the telic verb in (84), which is followed by the
particle out, can also occur with a bounded temporal adverb, in three hours. Since
Sumerian is strictly verb-final, the possibility of a particle-based system for controlling
the telicity of a verb seems out of reach. But recent work on the formation of verbal
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