Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Den Dikken notes that Voskuil’s translation of (99b) as “Parto writes my name up in his
agenda” suggests that “the affix -kan corresponds to a PARTICLE in languages like
Dutch or English” (Den Dikken 1995, 233 citing Voskuil 1990, 87).
The simplest way of describing BNBV inal predicates as particle-verb
constructions—particularly given Den Dikken’s discussion of role of verbal affixes in
forming particle-verb constructions in languages that do not exhibit prototypical particle-
verb constructions—would be to interpret the *bi-√ prefix as a particle. But I think that
the fact that *bi-√ prefix verbs regularly occur with either a locative or a BNBV
construction, in which a locative-terminative argument is the raised possessor of the bare
noun, suggests that the equivalent of the particle in such constructions is an actual
postposition: either the locative postposition or the locative-terminative postposition that
marks the raised possessor in a BNBV construction. The *bi-√ prefix simply indicates
that the locative or locative-terminative phrase is to be interpreted along with a zero-
marked noun as forming the equivalent of an existential “there” sentence (see section 3.4
for details). Taking gig.e igi bi 2-√ as a paradigmatic example and adopting a
conventionalized representation of it as [wheat-at eye there], the question is how does
“at” function as a particle in a particle-verb construction in an SOV languages like
Sumerian. Kayne has argued on the basis of the way in which hierarchically organized
syntactic structure is linearized (see Kayne 1994 for explication) that the underlying order
of this series of constituents is the opposite of the order in which they are found in the
text-artifactual record. This would yield [there eye at wheat] as the underlying order of
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