Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

3
Diagnosing presupposition in Sumerian
To review somewhat, having identified a distributional class, the BNBV inal predicates, on
the basis of a relatively simple diagnostic in chapter 1 (including an identification of the
BNBV inal construction as a low source applicative along with the “transfer of possession”
model that underlies low applicative semantics), chapter 2 sought to identify the type of
lexical aspect coded by a low source applicative such as the BNBV inal predicates. In the
end, the BNBV inal predicates were tentatively classified as achievements, which also
explained two seemingly unrelated properties: (a) the reduplication of *bi-√ prefix verbs
(switching to a larger group of data due to the virtual non-existence of reduplicated
BNBV inal predicates) which seem to function as adverbial clauses of cause or result (due
to the point-like aspectual profile of achievement predicates and the consequent inability
of another event to co-occur with the point of transition) and (b) the non-agentive
character of the zero-marked, absolutive case-marked noun immediately preceding a *bi-
√ prefix verb (including so-called “transitive” verbs in which the patient is not affected
by the event that the verb refers to, e.g., “Mary reached the summit”). Two consequences
of chapter 2, which were somewhat unexpected (though predicted by the theoretical
literature to some degree) lead us to the subject matter of this chapter: the point-like
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