Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

The copula -am 3 undergoes vowel harmony in (3); the underlying form is uzu.zu.am 3.
Still, it occurs immediately before the verb as in the previous examples. Thus it is
presumably reasonable, bearing in mind parallels from a number of verb-final languages,
to postulate a focus position immediately before the verb. If this is the case, then we may
want to interpret the i 3.na 8.na 8 in example (2) as a type of nomen agentis and argue that
the syntactic form of (2) consists of an extended nominal as represented in (4).
(4) [ Topic ga.œu 10 [ Focus i 3.na 8.na 8 d nisaba.ke 4 [ Presupposition am 3]
Bearing these examples of focus constructions in Sumerian in mind, I would like, at this
point, to turn to examples of focus-affected *bi-√ prefix verbs in the hope of clarifying
the particular way in which the *bi-√ prefix forms a definiteness effect environment. But
in order to resolve some of these issues, the focused and presupposed parts of any
particular clause need to be clearly differentiated.
Since the use of the copula, *-am, to mark contrastive focus is the clearest
morphosyntactic indicator of a focused constituent in Sumerian, it must obviously serve
as the primary diagnostic of any focus construction. But since focus can apply to
constituents of any size, we are in need of some means of delimiting the parts of a clause
that are not in focus as well. Take, for example, the following passage from Gilgamesh
and the Netherworld.
265