Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

My working hypothesis, which has been made more-or-less explicit from time to
time in the chapters leading up to this point, has taken nouns bearing a possessive
pronoun in sentence-initial position (alongside ergative case-marked nouns and
independent pronouns) as topical noun phrases due to the fact that they satisfy all three of
the features associated with topics: the possessive pronoun construction is necessarily
definite, I have assumed that they are resumed by null pronouns in the core of the
sentence and have translated accordingly although I know of no independent evidence for
such resumptive pronominalization, and they regularly occur in sentence-initial position.
The identification of focus constructions is somewhat more difficult since they regularly
lack possessive pronouns (unless they are also followed by the copula, which is
presumably introduced in focus precisely so as to allow for possessive pronouns and
other modifications of what would otherwise be a bare noun). Clearly the absence of
resumptive pronominalization is difficult to identify, but the fact that they regularly occur
in the position immediately before the sentence-final verb presumably indicates that there
is no subsequent position within the sentence in which a resumptive pronoun could occur.
The two following sections (as well as the entirety of chapter 4) speak to certain
aspects of topic constructions and focus constructions respectively: section 3.3 offers a
reinterpretation of verbs with the prefix *mini-√ as derived from *bi-√ prefix verbs that
have undergone topicalization through the addition of the third person animate possessive
pronoun, *-ni, as in the case of simple nouns above. This section also goes into the rather
unusual structure of certain head-internal relative clauses in Sumerian that corresponds to
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