Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

5
Possession, animacy and the rise of ergativity in Sumerian
In the final chapter, I attempt to draw together a few strands of the discussion up to now,
primarily in terms of the diachronic dimension of some of the foregoing proposals. In
section 5.1, I look at the tendency for inalienable constructions to be older—in terms of
the diachronic changes that are constantly taking place in a grammar—than constructions
involving alienable nouns and what this might tell us about the history of the BNBV inal
construction. In section 5.2, I evaluate several different proposals to explain the
development of ergativity in general and, in particular, the split of what I will term the
old locative postposition *-e into two distinct postpositions in the text-artifactual record:
the locative-terminative postposition and the ergative postposition. Section 5.3 offers a
brief conclusion and highlights several prospects for future research.
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