Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

aspectual profile of achievements as well as the use of the *bi-√ prefix to form
constructions that are analogous to indefinite relative constructions in other languages
suggest that one of the primary functions of the *bi-√ prefix is to indicate that the
absolutive noun that immediately precedes the *bi-√ prefix is equivalent in a number of
respects to an indefinite noun in languages that make use of an indefinite article, where
the indefinite noun is quite often derived, in some fashion, from the number one.
The only substantive way of testing whether what I have previously referred to as a
“bare indefinite” is in fact indefinite or not is to identify what is often termed a
“definiteness effect.” A morphosyntactic environment which exhibits a definiteness effect
(at least of the most well-known type such as English existential “there” constructions:
“There is a rat in the living room”) will generally exclude definite nouns from that
environment unless the noun is focus-affected. I argue that BNBV inal predicates in the
non-progressive/perfective aspect—the only grammatical aspectual category in which
they regularly appear—offer an environment that exhibits a definiteness effect and that
the zero-marked, absolutive noun that occurs in such environments must, therefore, be
indefinite. I see the definiteness effect environment in question as defined by two
essential features: the *bi-√ prefix codes a point-like achievement semantics, while the
perfective (˙amt¬u) aspect ensures that there is only one such point-like event. In the
progressive/imperfective aspect, however, the “oneness” of the predicate and hence its
similarity to the indefinite article would break down. There is, however, one particular
construction in which the restriction imposed by the definiteness effect weakens and the
verb regularly appears in the progressive/imperfective aspect, namely the negative
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