Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In languages with Pattern 6, whose ‘inalienable’ possession involves no marking
while ‘alienable’ possession is dependent-marked, the lack of marking for the
inalienable type is due to one of two historical factors: either the fixation of
inalienable constructions antedates the rise of case in the language, or the possessor
loses its case marker due to its incorporation into the head in a form of compounding
(Nichols 1988, 579).
Since the second of the two scenarios described by Nichols is clearly not the case in
Sumerian, I take the first of the two descriptions (“the fixation of inalienable
constructions antedates the rise of case in the language”) as a plausible scenario for
Sumerian. This would suggest that the BNBV inal construction is a kind of historical
artifact embedded in the grammar of Sumerian and that it may well provide a window
into the earlier history of the language. In particular, the nominative/dative, or
alternatively, the absolutive/oblique case marking system found in the BNBV inal
construction ([ absolutive/nominative ergative possessor + bare inalienable noun] vs. [ dative/oblique
object of perception]) corresponds quite closely to the “normalform” conjugation
discussed by Silverstein as the point of departure for the development of case-marking
schemata in other ergative languages (Silverstein 1976, 161; cf. Silverstein 1993a). This
raises the strong possibility that the different types of *bi-√ prefix constructions
(BNBV inal, alienable BNBV, *NP-a bi-√, etc.) can actually be thought of as
morphosyntactic primitives registering distinct combinations of particular case-marking
relations (or thematic structure) and inherent lexical content such as distinctions based on
inalienability and animacy. The following section describes two successive (and
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