Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

The hypothesis
Two unresolved problems with present-day reconstructions of Sumerian grammar have
troubled me since I first came into contact with the language: (i) the correlation or lack
thereof between topic/focus marking and (in)definiteness and (ii) questions of
subordination and pragmatic backgrounding in a written tradition in which each line is
typically a clause and the verb is regularly final, yielding few hints as to the syntactic
relations that hold between clauses. With the important exception of Yoshikawa’s work
(assembled in Yoshikawa 1993), few investigations of Sumerian have paid much
attention to how topic and focus are coded or differentiated in Sumerian. 1 But
comparative and typological studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the articulation of
topic and focus in a language tell us almost as much about the syntax of the language as
word-order and morphological patterns. At the same time, the articulation of topic and
focus in a particular language often interacts in a highly rule-governed fashion with
(in)definiteness. Take the two sentences in (1) and (2) for example (here and in the rest of
the dissertation, topics appear in italics with indices such as “i” in (1) marking
constituents that refer to the same entity; constituents in focus appear in capital letters).
(1) As for Mary i, I don’t know what she i wants.
(2) It’s THE CAR that needs to be fixed, (not the motor scooter).
1 Rubio suggests that “the choice of [conjugation] prefix seems governed by focus” (Rubio forthcoming, 29) on the
basis of Gragg’s suggestions to the same effect (Gragg 1973b, 93-94; Woods 2001, 394) and Vanstiphout’s discourse
analytical study of the *i- prefix (Vanstiphout 1985; Woods 2001, 394-395). Gragg’s rather general statement could
serve as a rather distant antecedent to my own views, translated into one of the contemporary theoretical programs, but
the more specific articulation of Vanstiphout on the basis of ± person and ± locus is really a codification conventional
Sumerological interpretations of the conjugation prefixes and should not serve as the basis for future investigations of
focus in Sumerian.
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