Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

complexes (Kayne 1994; Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000; Julien 2002) has argued that
verbal complexes are regularly derived through movement of phrases that appear to the
right of the verb in languages like English into positions on the left of the verb in
languages like Sumerian. This section argues that just such a phenomenon is at work in
Sumerian.
In an SVO language like English, the syntax of particle-verb constructions is fairly
clear: although the exact position of the adposition that serves as the particle varies, the
crucial feature is that the adposition never takes a complement, which results in a “bare”
adposition (hereafter referred to as a “particle”).
(85) a. Amanda poured out the bottle of wine
b. Amanda poured the bottle of wine out
Although one might imagine that the preposition “out” in (85a) takes the noun phrase
“the bottle of wine” as its complement to form a prepositional phrase “out (of) the bottle
of wine,” the variant form in (85b) shows that this is, in fact, not the case (leaving aside
possible preposition complement relations at underlying levels of representation). The
variant in (85b) has an ordinary noun phrase, “the bottle of wine,” as the direct object of
the main verb, “poured,” and a particle at the end of the sentence, “out,” without a noun
phrase complement of any kind. The fact that the two sentences in (85) have more-or-less
the same meaning indicates that—in all likelihood—the preposition in both sentences is
to be interpreted as a particle that has more to do with controlling the telicity of the verb
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