Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

and made the subject of a lengthy “appellation poem” (Michalowski 1996, 146), each line
of which is followed by the demonstrative *-re. Woods, as part of a larger effort to make
sense of deixis in Sumerian, has collected 42 examples of similar uses of *-re as a
demonstrative, 18 of which occur in the very same passage from the Ur Lament. Nearly
every line in the series of appellations that precede line 410 in description of the storm
ends with the demonstrative *-re (Woods 2001, 119-123). Woods has argued, quite
persuasively in my view, that the *-re demonstrative is the distal, non-visible member of
a ternary set of demonstratives (Woods 2001, 167 and 171):
*-e PROXIMAL
*-ße DISTAL, VISIBLE
*-re DISTAL, NON-VISIBLE
Although I find Woods’ interpretation of *-re quite appealing, many of his proposed
semantic/pragmatic features (from disjoint ontic realms [Woods 2001, 157-148] to an
iconic model of its discourse functions that maps the distal feature of the demonstrative to
the “end [or] final position [in] a relative clause [Woods 2001, 116]) can safely be
disregarded. As the examples that Woods has assembled make clear, the pragmatics of
the demonstrative follow quite directly from its semantic features: the demonstrative *-re
marks nominals (including relative clauses) that refer to an entity that is no longer visible
at the point in time when the verb of perception takes place. Woods indicates this in some
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