Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

similar to the previous examples of identificational *mini-√ constructions, except for the
fact that the topical noun phrase in this case is not in the ergative case, but rather a
possessive pronoun topicalization construction. At the same time, since the lexical
meaning of the presupposed predicate œal 2.la is precisely the opposite of the focused
predicate in nu.œal 2.la, the role of the copula as a contrastive focus marker is particularly
clear (see below, section 5.6, for an extended discussion of identificational focus).
My suggestion that *mini-√ prefix verbs, and in particular verbs having the prefix
*mini-b-√, act as textual demarcators along the lines of our own paragraph indentation is
also supported, in part, by the overall distribution of *mini-b-√ prefix verbs in the Old
Babylonian corpus. Unlike verbs of the form *mini-n-√, which occur in non-final
positions relatively often, verbs of the form *mini-b-√ regularly occur at the end of their
respective line with only a handful of exceptions, most of which occur in texts that I
suspect were composed in the Isin-Larsa period (including, crucially, a large number of
exceptions that occur in the laments). Although I hope to conduct an exhaustive
comparison between verbs of the form *mini-n-√ as opposed to those of the form *mini-
b-√ in future so as to further solidify the difference between topical and identificational
uses of the *mini-√ prefix, 31 I have not attempted to do so for the time being. The most
that can be said is that *mini-b-√ prefix verbs tend to occur in final position, whereas
verbs of the form *mini-n-√ show no such restriction. Given such a distribution, one
strong possibility that should be explored in future work is that the opposition between
31 In morphological terms, the alternation is driven by difference of grammatical aspect, but the morphology itself does
not explain the distributional differences between the two constructions.
230