Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

indicates that the concept was unfamiliar to him. This may explain Deutscher’s
characterization of the Old Akkadian system of relativization as “dysfunctional” (often in
conjunction with other pejoratives such as “maladaptive”) on four separate occasions in
the space of twenty pages (Deutscher 2002, 86, 92, 95, 102). But the “dysfunctional”
aspects of the Old Akkadian system—such as agreement between the external,
topicalized “head” and the true, clause-internal head in terms of gender, number and
case—follows quite directly from the fact that the external “head” is topicalized and
must, therefore, be resumed by a head within the relative clause that carries all of the
same inflectional information as the topicalized, external “head” of the construction. This
“full” resumption in conjunction with the restriction on definiteness marking on the head
of the Akkadian relative both point toward some type of HIRC as the starting point for
not only the Akkadian relative construction, but also the early construct state as
represented in early Semitic and Egyptian. In fact, I would argue that the appositional,
head-internal relative in Old Akkadian conforms quite closely to the Afroasiatic avatar of
head-internal relative clause formation (on the specificity-driven system in Middle
Egyptian, see Loprieno 1995, 158).
The same opposition between indefinite and definite HIRCs can, likewise, be seen in
the opposition between *bi-√ prefix relatives and *mini-√ prefix relatives in Sumerian.
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