Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

understood as a single component of a broader and older possessor raising regime in
which the BNBV inal construction plays a crucial role. Zólyomi notes, for example, that the
*bi-√ prefix “agrees” with a nominal phrase of the form *NP-a after the possessor raising
has taken place (Zólyomi 1999, 236), but this is just the familiar statement of locative
“agreement” and makes no clear connection between the existence of possessor raising
and the contribution of the *bi-√ prefix to either the possessor raising itself or the
semantics of the predicate.
I would argue, however, that the low source applicative hypothesis proposed in
chapter 1 explains both the presence of possessor raising (including *NP-a bi-√
environments as well as BNBV environments) and the distinctive causer/experiencer
semantics of the construction as a whole. Zólyomi’s causative analysis of alienable
BNBV predicates can be subsumed, in other words, as one component of a broader (low
source) applicative hypothesis alongside the experiential semantics of the BNBV inal class:
the *bi-√ prefix in conjunction with a bare inalienable noun acts as a low source
applicative morpheme, while in the presence of an alienable noun, it becomes causative
in function. The same pattern is also found in the examples of applicative/causative
alternation at the end of section 2.6. More importantly, it brings ongoing work on the
morphosyntax of Sumerian in line with descriptions of the same phenomena in other
languages.
Nichols does not describe a particular historical scenario for the type of clausal
possessive pattern that seems to be manifest in the BNBV inal construction, but what she
describes as “Pattern 6” is very close to the clausal pattern seen in Sumerian.
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