Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

349. i 3.gur 2 ki.a mu.na.ab.za He bowed and prostrated himself before her
220
on the ground,
Here, in the famous presentation scene from the end of Lugalbanda II, the reinterpretation
of mi.ni.in.gub as a topicalized indefinite relative construction in combination with the
causative semantics of non-BNBV inal *bi-√ prefix verbs would, if it were equivalent to the
four previous examples, result in the translation of line 346 as an epithet characterizing
Lugalbanda as causee (“The one made to take the joyful path to brick-built Kulaba”).
But such an interpretation (though in conformity with the general tenor of previous
interpretations) makes little since in context since both the line preceding 346 and the
two lines that follow line 346 are a description of Inanna in which the entrance of
Lugalbanda is, at least from a literary point of view, intrusive. There is, however, an
important formal difference between this example and the four previous examples:
whereas the location in the previous examples was in either the locative or the ablative
ki
case, the location in line 346 is in the terminative case: sig4 kul.aba4 .ße3. Since there is
no obvious semantic difference between the locative construction in, for example, line
172 of (22) above and the terminative construction in line 346, I would guess that the
opposition between locative and terminative is coding some other syntactic or semantic
feature that has previously gone unnoticed.
On the basis of contextual coherence and narrative sequence, I would hypothesize
that, whereas *mini-√ constructions that occur with a locative are causative relative
clauses that characterize the causee in some fashion, *mini-√ constructions that occur
with a terminative postposition characterize the causer or agent. This would allow line