Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

demonstrative reference, whereas the members of set B all code a locative or allative case
of some kind. Although *-re is clearly a member of set B as evidenced by the OBGT
paradigms, the parentheses around *-re in set A are meant to indicate that presence of
*-re in set A is somewhat uncertain; nonetheless, some of the examples of *-re cited by
Woods (2001, 118-123) are presumably members of set A rather than set B due to the
fact that they are clearly demonstrative in use with little or no case-marking value and
show no obvious connection to the riverine system of deixis or visual perception. 26
Woods also cites several examples from the OBGT and MBGT (Woods 2001, 133-
139) that are—as Woods acknowledges—contradictory as they exemplify two distinct
paradigmatic series: set B (*-e, *-ße, *-re) and what I will term set C (*-ne, *-ße, *-re).
Woods argues that set C represents an aberrant form of set B, but I think that a more
parsimonious explanation can be found if we begin with the deictic series as outlined
above. Given the widespread grammaticalization of the set A distal demonstrative, *-be,
both as the default possessive pronoun in the possessive pronoun topicalization system
and as the verbal prefix *bi-, its replacement by the corresponding member of set B
should not come a much of a surprise. Woods himself has argued (2001, 168, 220) that
the most likely site of grammaticalization within the deictic system is the element that
serves as an anaphoric pronoun most readily, namely *-be, the distal member of set A.
Once *-be had been grammaticalized as a component of the verbal prefix, its position
26 I should emphasize that such a reconfiguration of the demonstrative series need not call in question the overall tenor
of Woods’ argument that matters of deixis play a central role in the grammar of Sumerian. Some form of obviation (see
Aissen 1997), in which *-e may have functioned as a topic marker of some kind (and consequently as the marker of a
proximal argument in an obviational system) presumably played a part in Sumerian grammar at some point in its
history, but I would suspect that such an obviational system antedates even the development of case-marking in
Sumerian, which I take as a fairly early development.
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