Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

(“Specify” in Chung and Ladusaw’s opposition), and, at the same time, the change to a
marû verbal root invokes a pair-list reading of the bare noun that is now referentially
specific.
Such a scenario has several things that recommend it: (a) it fits nicely with the
contrastive focus construction (for non-BNBV inal predicates) in that a noun needs to be
individualized and made referential if is it is to serve as a point of contrast for some other
entity; (b) the non-occurrence of the marû form of the verb in the one example of a
BNBV inal predicate in the *XP nam bi-√ construction makes a certain amount of sense in
that, unlike all of the other examples of the *XP nam bi-√ construction, the example from
line 410 of the Ur Lament refers to what is, from an extensional point of view, a single
state of affairs rather than two entities that are mutually exclusive; and (c) the nominal
component of a compound verb is treated as, alternatively, non-referential (“Restrict”) or
referential (“Specify”) depending on the morphosyntactic environment in which it occurs.
If the predicate in question is a non-BNBV inal predicate, the bare noun is presumably non-
referential with a ˙amt≥u *bi-√ prefix verb, but in the complex morphosyntactic
environment of the *XP nam bi-√ construction, it becomes referentially specific and
acquires a pair-list reading. In terms of BNBV inal predicates, however, the semantic
interpretation of the bare noun is much more highly constrained: the non-referential
character of the bare inalienable noun clearly makes the transfer of possession model
advocated above possible, and in all likelihood, it also contributes to the thetic character
of verbs of perception. But the restriction on BNBV inal predicates in the *XP nam bi-
√ construction are equally clear: there is only a single, questionable example of the
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