Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

form of the indefinite relative in *mini-√, likewise, rarely if ever occurs in the
progressive/imperfective aspect. But the opposition between the locative postposition,
*-a, and the terminative postposition, *-ße 3, seems to mirror the opposition between non-
progressive/perfective aspect and progressive/imperfective aspect: whereas the locative,
*-a, indicates location in or at (and thereby implicitly the completion of the movement or
event), the terminative, *-ße 3, indicates motion toward (and thereby the non-completion
of the movement or event). So as to clarify the difference, the opposition between *-a and
*-ße 3 is perhaps best understood as an opposition between a “virtual perfective aspect,”
*-a, and a “virtual imperfective aspect,” *-ße 3: but only when all other avenues of
marking the opposition between non-progressive/perfective and progressive/imperfective
are neutralized as in the case of *mini -√ constructions does the aspectual opposition
between virtual perfective and virtual imperfective aspect come into play.
Linguists working with a number of different languages have repeatedly noted that
so-called head-internal relative clauses regularly take an indefinite noun as the head of
such a relative clause (Williamson 1987 on Lakhota; Hale 1976 on the languages of
Australia; Watanabe 1992 [cf. Nishigauchi forthcoming]; cf. Aldridge 2004 for a
discussion of internally-headed relatives from the point-of-view of antisymmetry). In
other traditions of grammatical investigation such as Assyriology and Egyptology, these
are often spoken of as indefinite or appositional relative constructions (for an overview of
previous interpretations of relativization in Sumerian, see Alster 2002) and are built up on
the model of the Semitic construct state, where the initial, head noun must necessarily be
unmarked for definiteness (for recent discussions of the Semitic construct state, see
235