Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

. kamree-mee aadmii hai
room-in man Cop.3Sg.Masc.Pres
LOCATIVE THEME VERB
There is a man in the room
If the order THEME, LOCATIVE, VERB in (47a) is taken as the standard order, then the
order of the elements in (47b) can be spoken of as “locative inversion” since the locative
expression precedes the theme rather than following it as it did in (47a). Freeze then
posits a basic complementarity between predicate locatives, which regularly include a
definite theme, and existential/have sentences, which typically include an indefinite
theme. Although Freeze fails to take into consideration the focus-affected, pair-list
readings of definite nouns in existential sentences, the overall scheme seems to be fairly
sound in typological terms and it conforms quite precisely to the basic dichotomy to be
found with the *bi-√ prefix verbs. As noted in chapter 1, throughout the history of the
*bi-√ prefix, there was always a basic dichotomy between an ordinary *bi-√ prefix
construction in which an absolutive theme was followed by a locative that usually
immediately preceded the verb and the construction dealt with in this study where a noun
in the locative-terminative case is followed by a bare absolutive noun that immediately
precedes the verb. The two examples from Hindi in (47), therefore, correspond quite
closely to this basic opposition in the *bi-√ prefix construction in Sumerian; the primary
difference is that in Hindi, two distinct lexical items serve as copula in the two
constructions, whereas Sumerian uses a single existential/“have” preverb, the *bi-√
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