Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

grammatical phenomenon begins with a purely formal criterion on the basis of which a
set of examples can be identified without recourse to the meaning of the examples. Once
the formal criterion and the examples that meet the criterion have been isolated, I attempt
to characterize the set of examples on the basis of both traditional philological practice
(including the use of analogous constructions in English and other well-known and
typologically similar languages such as Korean and Japanese) as well as the most recent
theoretical discussion of the relevant phenomenon in disciplinary linguistics. The
theoretical discussions often include predictions about special restrictions on certain
distributional classes and postulate associations with related phenomena and I have used
such predicted behaviors to form hypotheses about related distributional classes in
Sumerian. Much of the theoretical argumentation is, however, abbreviated or sometimes
omitted entirely where I felt that the Sumerian materials provided sufficient justification
for the meanings that I hypothesize. Ultimately, the only real justification for positing a
morphosyntactic category (whether lexical classification, for example, or derivational
morpheme) in Sumerian is the degree to which the hypothesized meaning of a particular
linguistic form makes better and more detailed sense of the particular contexts in which it
occurs; any linguistic theorizing or typological conformity merely provides a set of
predictions which constrain the formation of hypotheses, but have no real effect on their
validity in the Sumerian text-artifactual record.
One of the more troubling aspects of recent work on Sumerian morphosyntax is that
it has remained persistently morphological in orientation and avoided, wherever possible,
syntactic argumentation or investigation. Although the best traditions of Americanist
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