Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

4.5 Seeing something that is no longer there: The demonstrative *-re and
visual perception
The somewhat unusual characterization of contrastive focus in Sumerian in the foregoing
pages has a number of features to recommend it, notably the degree to which it makes
sense of otherwise recalcitrant textual passages. But the major flaw it embodies is that in
no case—not even one—is the positive contrastive alternative to the negated focal phrase
present in the text-artifactual record. In light of such a seemingly problematic empirical
gap, I would like to offer a redescription of the phenomena in the previous section that
captures the contrastive force of the construction without necessarily positing a distinct,
positive contrastive sentence that is regularly deleted under relevance. At the same time,
the alternative proposed in this section—based on Herburger’s analysis of double
negation in Spanish—also helps us to make sense of the igi nam bi 2.ib 2.du 8 construction
in the previous section. I should emphasize that the interpretation of the *XP nam bi-√
construction in this section is not necessarily incommensurable with that of the previous
section: given the different levels at which a particular grammatical construction can be
evaluated (morphological, semantic, pragmatic, generic), the previous section can be
thought of as an investigation of the construction in pragmatic or generic terms, whereas
this section looks more directly at its morphosyntactic and semantic details.
As part of a quite involved argument on the nature of focal presupposition that need
not detain us here, Herburger reviews certain interesting double negative constructions in
Spanish (Herburger 2000, 23-26). The following examples provide a useful starting point
(Herburger 2000, 24, ex. 19 and 20).
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