Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

contrastive focus construction with the form *XP nam bi-√ (where XP refers to either a
nominal or a postpositional phrase).
On the basis of contextual investigation of all the known exemplars from the Old
Babylonian period (in chapter 4), I interpret the *XP nam bi-√ construction as a negative
contrastive focus construction (“It was not IN THE STREET that I hit the car, [but rather
IN THE DRIVEWAY]”) and argue that the reason that the verbs in such constructions
regularly appear in the progressive/imperfective is that the contrastive focus neutralizes
the definiteness effect, allows a definite noun to occur in the construction, and forces the
verb to appear in the progressive/imperfective so as to indicate that the noun is no longer
indefinite. Since the indefinite interpretation of the BNBV construction (including
alienable BNBV predicates) stems in part from the perfectivity of the verbal root, a
progressive/imperfective verb presumably indicates that the absolutive noun is not
indefinite (and by implication definite). Interestingly enough, the lone example of a
BNBV inal predicate in the *XP nam bi-√ construction exhibits a number of eccentricities
that differentiate it from both non-compound *bi-√ prefix verbs and other compound
*bi-√ prefix verbs, the most striking of which is the absence of the marû-stem suffix that
is found on all other, non-BNBV inal examples of the construction.
The common theme that relates this chapter and the following one is presupposition.
Indefinite nouns regularly lack presupposition in most contexts, but an indefinite noun is
often used to introduce a new topic that is subsequently presupposed by subsequent
discourse: in large measure, the meaning of any particular indefinite noun is a function of
the relation that holds between presupposed and entailed propositions or parts thereof.
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