Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Section 3.1 starts out with a brief definition of presupposition and juxtaposes it to
entailment. The rest of the section notes the use of existential verb constructions to code
indefiniteness in certain languages and argues that the same mechanism also operates in
Sumerian. In the following section, section 3.2, a basic opposition is drawn between
presupposition and focus, where the part of a sentence that is not under focus—namely
the presupposition—remains true under negation in contrast to the focused constituent
which is the only element that is negated. Section 3.3 looks at topicalized *bi-√ prefix
verbs as represented by the form *mini-√: these are, I argue, to be interpreted as
indefinite relative constructions that have been topicalized (and also made definite)
through the addition of the third person animate possessive pronoun, *-ni. In other
languages that make use of head-internal relative constructions, the head noun of the
relative clause must be indefinite, but the clause itself can then be made definite as a unit;
indefinite relatives in *bi-√ seem to conform to the pattern quite closely. Section 3.4
defines the definiteness effect in some detail and section 3.5 returns to the question of
head-internal relative constructions in Sumerian. Recent work on head-internal relative
constructions in Korean, Japanese and other typologically similar languages has
suggested that head-internal relative constructions regularly constitute definiteness effect
environments, so section 3.5 also considers whether the same holds true in Sumerian.
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