Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

3.5 Head-internal relatives revisited
Now that topic, focus, and the definiteness effect have been outlined in a preliminary
way, I would like to return to my earlier discussion of head-internal relatives in Sumerian
and Akkadian. When last we saw the Akkadian HIRC at the end of section 3.3, I had
argued that b®tum in the following example was topicalized and that it was then resumed
by the demonstrative relative marker ßa, which I take as the true head of the relative
clause in this Akkadian example.
(49) [ DP [ Topic b®t-um] [ Focusßa e¢puß-u]] imqut
house-Def Rel do.1Sg.Perf-Subord fall.3Sg.Perf
As for the house, namely the one that I built, it collapsed
One of the most interesting features of HIRCs is the fact that they are definiteness effect
environments. A skeptic might point out that the presence of the demonstrative/relative,
ßa, as the head of the relative clause, ßa e¢pußu, would seem to militate against it as a
definiteness effect environment since demonstratives are necessarily definite and definite
noun phrases are regularly excluded from such environments, but we should remember
that definite nouns can occur in such environments when they are focused. The “topic +
focus” model of the relative clause that I have sketched in (49) would regularly provide
the head noun with focus as long as it is preceded by a coreferential topic. Unlike the
sentence in (49), where the topicalized noun phrase, b®tum, must be definite in order to be
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