Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

55. su 8.ba.ra ki d œeßtin.an.na.ka.ße 3
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Rather, for the shepherd, let us go to the
ga.an.ßi.re 7.en.de 3.en dwelling of Geshtinana,
The interesting thing about these two examples is that they conform to the BNBV inal
construction in that the experiencer appears in the ergative case as an inalienable
possessor of a body-part noun, a.ba.a < /aba-e/, and there is not even a hint of the
causative semantics that we might expect with a non-BNBV inal predicate, but the subtle
differences between bi 2.in.du 8, im.mi.in.du 8 and mi.ni.in.du 8, which all seem to come
down to matters of quantification and definiteness are in need of further investigation
(see the end of this chapter for one possible set of distinctions).
The obvious question is why the alternation between a locative postposition and the
terminative position should have anything to with whether the relative form in *mini-√
refers to a causer or a causee. But recall the discussion of progressive/imperfective
achievements in chapter 2. There I argued that progressive/imperfective achievements are
unusual in that, whereas the non-progressive/perfective form is regularly non-agentive,
the progressive/imperfective form has the possibility of expressing agentivity due to the
“activity” inherent in any progressive/imperfective verb. There is, in other words, an
association between activity predicates (as well as the activity component of
accomplishments) and agentivity. If, as I argued at the beginning of the section,
*mini-n-√ predicates are derived from the *bi-√ prefix indefinite relative construction,
which is in turn limited to non-progressive/perfective aspect by the indefinite head noun
that it serves as the relativization of, it should come as no surprise that the topicalized