Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

(9) direct experience > visual > heard > inference > hearsay
existential sentence > perception reports > direct speech > indirect speech . . .
Thus the morphosyntactic form of expressions in English that are used to report
perception in all its variety systematically exclude presupposition and regularly occur
with indefinite perceived objects. At the same time, in a description of “languages
without indefinite pronouns, Heine describes the use of existential sentence constructions
to form indefinite pronouns in Tagalog and a Nilo-Saharan language named Lango
(Heine 1997, 54-57, ex. 120, 130). Lipinski has also commented on definiteness in
Nilotic (a branch of Nilo-Saharan) as follows:
like Nilotic languages, Old and Middle Egyptian dispense, as a rule, with any
equivalent of a definite or indefinite article, but an important feature of several
Nilotic languages consists in showing definiteness by the use of verbal forms
involving an internal vowel change, viz. the “qualitative” (indefinite) and the
“applicative” (definite) (Lipinski 2001, 26)
Presumably a significant portion of the morphosyntactic complexity of Egyptian arises
from the need, in the earlier phases of the language, to code (in)definiteness through
syntactic means such as topic and focus, a situation that parallels that of Sumerian in a
number of respects.
In terms of the language internal resources of Sumerian, clauses that report direct
speech and/or direct perception are the best candidates if our goal is the identification of a
morphosyntactic environment in which indefinite nouns regularly occur, and it just so
happens that the verbal prefix that usually occurs with both verbs of direct speech and
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