Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Although the omission of the nominal suffix -um and the relative pronoun ßa is often
taken as more-or-less arbitrary, the fact that ßa can be replaced by indefinite pronouns
such as mamma(n) “someone” and mimma “something” (Huehnergard 2000, 188)
indicates that the construction in (37a) is not so much indefinite as neutralized with
respect to definiteness, expressing neither definiteness nor indefiniteness. In (37b),
however, the pattern of the two constructions comes into view: the suffix -um, as
elsewhere in Akkadian, indicates that the noun that it modifies is a topic (this topichood
was subsequently assimilated to nominative case, but such assimilation is a secondary
phenomenon [the association of -um with topic and -am with focus undoubtedly served as
the basis for a later assimilation to a nominative/accusative rection along the same lines
as, for example, -(n)un and -(l)ul in Korean, cf. the contrast between -e and -am 3 in
Sumerian]). If b®tum is taken as a topic, the rest of the relative clause in (37b) can then be
interpreted as a HIRC, where the frozen relative marker, ßa (at least in Old Babylonian),
corresponds to a highly grammaticalized demonstrative indicating definiteness or
specificity. The clause in (37a) can then be taken as a head-internal relative in which the
noun that was topicalized in (37b) is incorporated into the relative and serves as the head
of a relative that is unmarked for definiteness. The crucial difference between the two is
topicalization: (37a) lacks a co-referent topic that the demonstrative ßa would have
resumed, while (37b) has such a topic available and uses the demonstrative ßa as a
resumptive pronominal. Although there are good reasons to recommend Deutscher’s
description of the history of relativization in Akkadian (2002), he fails to mention “head-
internal relatives” anywhere in the paper (even in the section on typology) which
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