Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

descriptive characterizations applicable to the construction in question, this amounts to a
relatively straightforward typological question. Is there some grammatical category or
phenomenon that shows a similar set of properties, distributional and semantic? The
answer came in the form of a recently completed MIT dissertation (Pylkkänen 2002).
Pylkkänen, working within the Distributed Morphology branch of the generative tradition
(see Marantz 1998 for orientation and bibliography), proposed a number of subdivisions
within the group of phenomena known as applicative constructions, constructions in
which an adpositional phrase of one kind or another loses its adpositional morphology
and becomes directly involved in the syntactic processes of the verbal predicate. One
particular type of applicative in the typology of applicative constructions proposed by
Pylkkänen, the low source applicative, corresponds particularly well with the Sumerian
phenomenon dealt with herein and I argue that the *bi-√ prefix in a BNBV inal construction
should be classified as a low source applicative. The low source applicative hypothesis
not only makes sense of the particular syntactic and semantic phenomena associated with
inalienable nouns that immediately precede *bi-√ prefix verbs, but it also conforms to
Zólyomi’s description of certain rather specific features of what is known as the directive
case hypothesis (see Zólyomi 1999 for orientation). But the low source applicative
hypothesis also predicts a number of previously unrecognized semantic phenomena that
are associated with the subset of *bi-√ prefix compound verbs that include a bare
inalienable noun, including the use of the ergative case to code an experiencer argument
and an association of the locative-terminative or non-human dative argument with a
perceived or adversely affected argument. Hence I argue that the “ergative” postposition,
14